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| Illustration by Chloe Scheffe |
FLASH FICTION
To My Younger Self
by Cora Frazier
16 August 2018
Don’t cry so much. Don’t bite your mom’s nipples when you’re breast-feeding. Pee in the toilet. Grow teeth. Don’t hit your younger brother on the head with a hairbrush. Learn to read. A, B, C, etc. Practice. Don’t draw on yourself in black magic marker and walk around naked when your parents have friends over. Don’t tell your cousin about vampires. Don’t eat an entire thick paper magazine subscription card. Don’t throw your clothes in the bubble bath. Be confident in yourself.
Don’t tell your younger brother not to lick the pole when it’s freezing outside, because then he will do it—otherwise it never would have occurred to him. Don’t lie to your parents and say that a first-grader saw a mountain lion on the playground, causing your school to go on lockdown, and the secretary hid under her bulletproof desk in such a way that her butt stuck out. Don’t cry when the boys drop your elephant pencil into the hollow fence post in the alley. Tell someone what’s happening at school. Say “The boys are beating me up.” Say “I got a bloody nose because Parker threw me against the fence.”
Don’t lie to Lily and say that your parents got mad at you for letting her borrow money to buy a red tank top from Wet Seal, only because you’re jealous of how good her boobs look in it. Try to enjoy yourself with Jordan. When he calls you from college, say things other than complaints about your friends on the Mock Trial team making backhanded comments.
Don’t die. There’s no reason to. Why would you die? Be confident in yourself. With age you’ll learn that you shouldn’t. You’ll like being alive. You’ll look back at your younger, dead self and say, “She’s so beautiful. She didn’t know what she had.”
Don’t haunt Jordan. What did Jordan ever do to you, besides say that he wanted to “pursue other friendships,” a.k.a. “date other women,” the night before you flew to Morocco by yourself? I feel like it would be healthier not to apologize to him when you run into him at Grand Army Plaza. Like, maybe the apology led to regrets and desires to haunt him.
Don’t roam the earth looking for your wishbone necklace. It’s probably somewhere between the floorboards of Corey’s studio. Though maybe not, because he keeps the floorboards so clean, and you only met him a short time before your death. Don’t howl and moan, making gusts blow and trash fly and beams shake. I know it was a nice, simple necklace, of a flattering length on your clavicle, but wasn’t it only $30? And could you even wear it anymore?
Don’t lie beside Jordan and his new girlfriend, watching them sleep, imbuing their bed with a subtle chill, making them alternatingly get up to close the window, only to discover that the window isn’t open. Don’t breathe on the blankets, covering them with a frost imperceptible in the darkness. Don’t fall asleep yourself on their floor like they’re your parents and later wake up to the smell of coffee and the echoes of a podcast.
As your mom waits for the train in Penn Station, reading the Times on her phone, held up close to her face, her eyes narrow and her hand tucked neatly beneath her black purse, sit beside her if the seat is free. Slide your fingers between the strands of her long hair until she closes her eyes blissfully, no matter how terrifying the article she’s reading is. When she’s replanting the azalea bush, barely sweating, because she never sweats—unlike you, before you were ectoplasm—try not to weep. It won’t make a difference, and you never know when she’ll catch a sense of your grief.
You will fly next to Corey as he rides his bike across the Brooklyn Bridge, something you could never do when you still had solid legs. That’s O.K. You will perch on his desk at work and poke him in the ribs so he yelps and his co-worker looks over from a solitaire game. You will sit on his chair and wrap your legs around him like a barnacle on his body, and when he gets up, you won’t slide down to the floor. Instead you will hover. You could follow him into the men’s room, but maybe you’re feeling lazy. You will sit on his bookshelf when he’s doing calisthenics in his studio, in shorts and no shirt, making loud, audible exhalations. You will spoon him every night. When he’s cooking, you will hand him things. You will make sure the stove is off. When he’s thinking, “What was that called?” you will shout the answer into the studio in your loudest phantom voice. You will wish he could hear you, even if he still says that you gave fake apologies. You will ride in the passenger’s seat as he is driving home, but, just in time, you’ll switch to the couch in his studio so you can remember what it was like to see him walk through the door.
And then one day you’ll know you have to release your tight grip on phantasmagoric consciousness, and when you do, you’ll float up into the ether—or is it down? Or sideways? Are you spinning or tumbling? Are you moving or staying still? Is it infinitely large or infinitely nonexistent? And what would the difference be? And would you be O.K. with not remembering enough to miss it all, to miss them all, to miss yourself?
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