Trapped in Forever

44 ~ As Simple as the Word Crush

Most of Mikayla’s room has been packed away into cardboard boxes, labeled in Sharpie with different destinations scribbled on the beige side of the box, the cardboard rim of each box slowly beginning to overflow with objects, like alarm clocks with the extension cord wrapped around the screen and high school yearbooks that she scribbled on the glossy cover with the same Sharpie she used to write on the sides of the boxes, labeling it either as a donation, garbage, or to keep,  with the exception of one box she kept off to the side, by the corner of her closet, the cardboard wrinkled on one of the corners, with no label on the surface. The hardwood flooring of her room slowly came into view, scuffed and scratched by her heels, most of which were stuffed in the donate box, mismatched and multicolored heels pointing upward, like they were just tossed into the box, without a care, without a thought, like she hadn’t remembered grasping them by her fingertips and sneaking out through the window to some party that she would still smell faintly of in the morning when she came home. It made me bemused, seeing all of these pieces of Mikayla’s life stuffed in boxes that she was sending somewhere else, shipping them away from her, six inch heels and eye shadow palettes and lacy bras Mom pretended not to see and made Dad shake his head, grumbling as he walked away.

Posters of bands I never heard of, with black lipstick and eyeliner, even on the men, tacked up on her walls with multicolored thumbtacks were gone, leaving little holes in the four, now bare walls, and crumbled into little balls that landed in her trashcan. Portraits of her and other guys, with dazed expressions and inflamed pimples surrounding their pale hairline were in the trashcan too, plus all of her eyeliner and her bottles of nail polish in varying colors of darkness—black, navy, dark purple, dark red, dark anything, really—were trapped in there too, along with Nicorette gum wrappers. I didn’t even realize that Mikayla smoked, or smoked that much, but now every time I saw her, she was unwrapping another stick and popping it into her mouth or she was already chewing on one.

She stopped wearing black too, and miniskirts, and her normally bare feet were now covered with neon green socks, and I remembered when I first saw her out of her usual dark attire, in her bedroom, lifting one of the cardboard boxes off of the floor, the newly discovered glitter lava lamp rattling inside, and there she was, in a plaid red, black, and white blouse, with a white tank top on underneath, and most of the buttons were done up, and a pair of flare jeans and some beaded, bright brown moccasins. Her black jelly bracelets were still adorning one of her arms, but they were partially hidden by her sleeve, but none of that was nearly as surprising as her hair. Her hair, no longer crimped with a headband wrapped around her forehead, or so long that it swayed against her hips as she moved. Now it was shorter, like after years of reluctantly getting it trimmed to get Mom off of her back, she finally actually had it cut to a medium length that stopped at her chest, and was wavy at the tips. It looked different, it made her look different. Not like the person who tried to open champagne bottles with butter knives or stumbled onto curbs drunk and barefoot. She looked like someone else. Someone who was finally taking control.

I didn’t know what Mom thought, though, about Mikayla’s hair, about her new wardrobe, about her possessions being packed into boxes that would soon leave the four walls of her bedroom, showing every time she walked by her room that Mikayla really was going, really was going to donate most of her stuff, really was going to toss out a quarter of her things. She—Mom, that was—never really talked about Mikayla leaving, not even to Dad in the kitchen while she did the dishes and he finished his decaf coffee, muttering that she wasn’t ready, wasn’t mature enough, but now she did the dishes silently. At first, I thought this meant that eventually, when she loaded up all of those boxes into her car and yanked open the driver’s side door, Mom would explode with all of these sentences, with all of the reasons why this couldn’t happen, but then, as Mom asked if she wanted her to take some of the boxes out of her way and run them down to the thrift store for her, and when she started giving her opinion on apartments—too bad of a neighborhood, or that’s where a drug dealer lived, or that a studio would be cheaper—and started pointing out places she thought were nice, it seemed the other way around. Like she was accepting it. Or maybe she was trying to regain control of a situation that she had lost.