Costa Rica 2009 Cora Schipa

Miss her. Angry blue eyes, cruelly cut bangs, freckles tumbling from the bridge of an upturned nose. Yet that profound softness in her voice, the way her tan peeled away in delicate strips, canines so tiny and sharp I leaned up-close to see. The heat of sweet breath. So immensely a child. Thinking now of the way salt clung to the soft white fur on our legs and glimmered-- I could cry. Those legs taking us anywhere we wanted to go, hot to the touch, identically sunburned, tangled on a bright hammock. Jutting out from our father’s scratchy polo shirts, all knees. We wore only bathing suits, taking showers together in them, pulling at our loose tops to get the black sand stuck there, revealing my whiteness bright as the tiles, her Argentinian skin just a shade darker: we’re all girls here. We’re just girls. We were just girls.

Miss her. Miss us both. Miss those few days dinner was called, laid out on lacquered wood, mothers drinking in that vacation way that edges on frightening but it’s all fun. There’s howler monkeys in the trees, mama is kissing dad and all the adults laugh in another world as easy childhood sleep pulls me under, fresh sheets crunching against hot skin. Hard knot of bathing suit leaving an imprint on my spine I wouldn’t notice the next morning, hair in briny bunches I sucked on as we collapse on the blue-painted porch in childhood boredom. We didn’t think about it. The minutes dense as earth. Time belonged to us

until it didn’t. The night before we had to leave we sat knees-to-knees in our room and promised not to forget each other, ever, and we believed it the way little girls believe things with such fury, such fervor, hands clasped tight, vigorous nodding. I had a sense, even then, that memory was the only thing that mattered. Our time capsule: tiny pinkish clam shell, licked on both sides, tacky with spit. The morning seared bright across stuffed suitcases. I wasn’t sad when we drove away. I knew, somehow, we’d be lost to each other forever. Meeting again would be two strangers grasping for ways to relate and not finding much to hold onto. It’s okay knowing we existed somewhere, sometime, someplace, without having to exist here, together, now. Driving away, I didn’t look in the rearview. I held the shell against my cheek;

thirteen years later, I open my jewelry box and it’s there. Real.

Miss her. Miss us. Haven’t forgotten. Remember.