Lakewood Nora gets sunburnt on Thursdays.
She sees ghosts on every front porch, storefront, tree lawn. She goes to the same coffee shop each morning.
She cries during sunsets. She lets her hair get stuck in her lipgloss, windows rolled down on the Shoreway. Lakewood Nora says she hates reminiscing and spends days hibernating in her past. Memory overlays truth like handwriting on an overhead projector’s transparency. She’s thankful for the lake’s breeze and avoids the places where happiness was once the only feeling she could see on the horizon.
She rents space in her body to newness. Tries it on for size. Everything fits better now. When she sweats, when the air is thick, she no longer gets angry. She lets things go. She spreads the ashes of her childhood pet along the edges of the garage of her first home. Her tears fall from behind her sunglasses, her lips don’t quiver. She still checks every room for spiders.
Ginger beer by the water, chain link fences, watermelon juice sticky on her legs. Do you remember biking to the river? Do you remember bruised knees in the backseat of your car? Do you remember the parts of the stories she’s beginning to forget?
There’s that house we loved, there’s that corner that was ours, there’s the street on which we danced in the rain. She greets each ghost by name.
Lakewood Nora had never been to Harborview Drive, off of Edgewater and West 117th. Each home is perched on the lake, guarded by cars and fireflies and wrought iron gates. How strange, to discover a new thing, now, in the depths of it all. Coming home feels like retracing steps that can never be repeated and it hurts. It hurts so much. But she didn’t make space for the pain of discovering something new in the midst of all that familiar ache of home. She says out loud that the best parts of her will never again exist in the way they once did. The new parts lack what they will never know.
Back in New York, caught in a thunderstorm on Elizabeth Street, there’s no one to stay dry for. She walks home in the rain.