Author: Lenna Suminski

By Lenna Suminski

In the backseat of this stranger’s car I found out what love was. You thought I was asleep but brushed my hair anyway. I kiss your hands. I don’t ever want to reach my house. My parents say I’ll look back at how much I fought them for you and laugh. Maybe. But right now I can’t imagine a time without you. 

How do we elucidate the ephemeral as eternal? I love you. You love me too. 

That may be clear as day, but up in Linkou the woods are foggy and this is my terrain and all of it is so simple and I never would’ve guessed: love is you stroking my hair when I sleep, I look up at you and we both smile. 

The first time you fall in love you understand what it all means. The lights at the park turning on at the same moment I talk about you to my best friend means something. The butterfly that looks like a moth on the hotel wall that my mother booked for our prom night meant something. Our grandmothers going to the same elementary school meant something. The first time you fall in love you put your ear to the conch shell I retrieved for you and the whole world sings. Nobody has ever heard all this symphony before. The first time you fall in love you cannot differentiate if you are discovering something or if the love you hold is merely materializing. 

The first time you fall in love you think it will last forever. The rawness of its purity is almost graphic. “Youth is hardly human: it can’t be, for the young never believe they will die…” At the parties we used to all use for any incident of celebration, you get drunk and messy. You never let me leave your side. I liked you best in those moments, where you’d unabashedly need me, need to touch me, need to hold me up from getting pushed, need to sing lyrics to a love song to me. Like it was necessary. The primitiveness and disparity of it was always undeniable, I loved feeling uncivilized. And if I left you’d look for me, reach for me from across the room. And if someone sprayed champagne on me and I got mad and wanted to leave you’d give me your shirt to wipe it off. If I left you’d always follow, and the party would be over because everyone followed you. You’d buy me midnight ramen and we never waited in any line. 

The first time you fall in love you feel it before you know it. You remember slices of time that won’t become significant until afterwards. When I climbed out of my bedroom window and down an ancient tree to meet you at a horrible after party. At 3am we left to go to a park to talk, anguished by teenage anxiety or what they call butterflies in stomachs. You didn’t know you could feel so alive without spending anything, I didn’t know it was possible for my mind to go quiet. On that picnic bench under a canopy of trees the soft rain doesn’t reach us. Your hands hover across mine for hours before you dare to hold them. I write about you. 

He feels like water. Is this real? Are we something? Do we dare Knead and mold potential and promise into legend? I feel undignified and brave, like a man who stole fire for some Lovely, O lovely creature–O, you are a lovely dove of a boy! If you want fire to move slow, I will pinch every pine needle, rip, dye Every willow or redwood and there Will be swirls of fog and clouds to eat. You can twirl my hair Away from my face. I’ll bite your Ear, ponder our demise, Wave at skateboarders tailing by and Tuck my virtue in the

concave of your shoulder and head. How do I tell you I’m in love with you like The Arctic’s gentle remembrance of diminishing ancient ice, Dissolving and returning back, To you. 

When I say you feel like water I mean: I love you. 

The first time you fall in love you describe it like an imagery you’ve never experienced. I tell everyone we feel like kids underwater. In a public swimming pool, suspended and submerged and surrounded by women’s polka dot two-pieces and neon swim trunks. In very juvenile terms, love feels like two kids looking at each other underwater, eyes open, bleached, swirling half-bodies all around. 

The first time you fall in love you don’t know any better but to hope. The night before you left for college, in your bedroom and its pitch-black, we have sex for the last time. I start crying when you’re in me. I asked you months ago, Can we just go everywhere together? Yes. Can we just do everything together? Yes. Can we just stay together until we can’t anymore? Yes. What does can’t anymore mean? I don’t know. This was when we can’t anymore. This is the last time, I kept repeating it like I couldn’t quite believe it. It’s not the last time, stop saying that. I feel the wet against my cheek, you’re on top of me and we’re crying together, static. No, but it’ll never be like this again. I stare at your eyes that I couldn’t see in that dark. 

The first time you fall out of love you do crazy things. I did coke in ball bathroom stalls and let a self-proclaimed Maoist prophet take polaroid nudes of me with roses. I smoked cigarettes out of car windows when “Killer Queen” blasts out of a stranger’s car. I almost married a man that likes mean sex. He’d write love poems that weren’t very good and make them about God and deliver them to me like he was bringing me salvation. I got a lower-back tattoo that made me sluttier than I ever was with you. You can always tell if a man loves you by the way he fucks you. 

Over coffee I tell a friend I’ve been going to church a lot. 

Why? 

Because I’ve been having too much sex. 

He spits out his matcha latte at the vulgarity of my bluntness and we burst out laughing. The first time you fall out of love you try to find God everywhere, kneeling before believing until your knees are dented and bruised, quoting lines from Nietzsche’s Aphorisms on Love and Hate and wonder why I’d ever think men would always be gentle. I tried to drown myself in Holy Water. 

The first time you fall out of love you do everything you can to reinvent yourself. You book 3-day stays at your college town’s best hotel and fuck the pornstar you flew in. Luxury Room, One King Bed, Two Adults. Then you wait for her to get dressed, some elegant blue dress probably, fake eyelashes, an Uber Black to your fraternity formal. Was it fun to wine-and-dine a woman your father would scorn at? Was it validating to present prettiness to your friends, proving that you weren’t just a one-hit-wonder?

There are distractions that you use to lobotomize yourself from those withdrawals. Double-vodka lime, double-gin and tonic, double glasses of wine at dinner, double the romance, divide the grief. None of anything I did was original. It’s nice to know heartbreak is universal. Too many first dates and after you fall out of love for the first time you need to explain yourself all over again. 

I blow at every dandelion I see. I like horses, I know the correct way to cut and dry every flower. My favorites are lilies of the valley. No, they are dif erent from lilies. My favorite place in the world is up the volcano-mountain near my old high school. They’d let you get in the mud with rainboots and pick the calla lilies yourself. 

I leave out the part where you’d drive me, Beach House blasting. The picture of my hair wild and head out the window from the passenger seat is the last slide on my Hinge. You were next to me. 

I used to dye my hair black every two weeks. I gave myself stick-and-pokes when I was 13. I was a bitch in high school. My dog’s name is Wolfy. No, I have no allergies. My dad was a writer. I am my grandmother’s favorite. The ritualistic determination ceremony said I would be a writer, too. No, not like in Divergent. Well, maybe kind of? I tried to kill myself twice. I like baking pies. 

I think with every line, every biometric fact I recited about myself I went a little further away from you. Its recreation, pattern recognition. All these things about me existed before you and they continue to live out after you. Plans carry on as they were supposed to. You fly over to the mountains to ski and watch the fireworks on New Year’s Eve. I imagine us both getting drunk, separately. Champagne or soju with family friends: the men you call uncle who cheat on their wives and the women you call auntie who collect Birkins and lorazepam. You were supposed to open the collage of flowers over our year together with my parents on Christmas, I bailed on your mother’s welcoming invites to go shopping with her below the slopes. 

The first time you fall out of love you think of it as something sudden, you lose sight of the deterioration, the rot. It hits me six months later, I text my best friend when my antidepressants stop working. The water is all I can remember. Even after all those fights, all those pockets of boredom, raised voices, unanswered phone calls. Every ending brings me back to the beginning. And I could’ve made it work. I wanted to see the world and I did I did my time I did my Odyssey but Claire I just want to go back underwater with him. I just want to go back underwater with him. I am absolutely depraved. But I wanted to be his wife I just wanted to stay underwater with him. 

I hug your dad when I see him again and apologize with my eyes for dumping his son. He liked me because I conducted every disastrous performance with well manners and pious politeness. And he always laughed at my jokes, I was always so good with dads–balancing youthful femininity like Old Hollywood starlets with copied stoicism from my own sophisticate scholar-father. Your mother liked me because I looked good next to you and I was a good cook, and kept any harlotry far away from her. I miss them both, I write them a letter, I text your sister on her Sweet Sixteen. 

The first time you fall out of love your family refuses to stop bringing it up. Christmas break was claustrophobic. I escape the family dinner parties where bored housewives tell me about your summer

internship, tell me they saw the pictures of us at prom that your mother proudly presented over brunch. We haven’t spoken in weeks and everytime we do we fight, nastily, like we’ve never done before. I give some sanitary explanations about people growing and well wishes and escape to the library or my bedroom with bottles of Bordeaux. Lying on my princess bed with the mesh drapes, four dried bouquets from you on each corner pole. Your clothes in an oversized Dior shopping bag in my walk-in closet, the purple walls that you helped me paint on my 18th birthday. I want you to die and I want to grow old with you. Nauseating, I give up trying to claw you out of my mind. 

The first time you fall out of love your friends can’t forget me. Sleeping on air mattresses with a girl none of them respect, you make faces when they bring up my name every two hours. You’re too lazy to even fake chivalry with her, she orders her own food at dinner. You smoke a cigarette with our mutual friend and tell her you’re focusing on yourself, she believes you but watches your face fall when you exhale the Marlboro Gold. You pretend the break-up was mutual, you pretend you didn’t send letters and flowers and beg for me back when it was too late. Cashing out on your dad’s American Express card for the only vein of masculinity you know how to give–to give. 

The first time you fall out of love you think it will linger forever. It doesn’t. The second time I fall in love I catch it coming. It happens in the National Gallery, over coffee in Covent Garden, she beats me at Scrabble in an Irish pub. I write letters. She sketches. I phone my mother on a random Wednesday and come out to her. The second time you fall in love you creep with hesitation, you remember the rot. You prolong the fall, I ruin it because I am no longer as brave as I was when I was 17. The first time you fall out of love will be tattooed on you like the seven-stich-scar on my left hand, or like my tramp-stamp you never got to see. 

The first time you fall out of love you let it dilute and fade, you know you’ll wade past it. You ignore my hair on both sides of the pillowcase, you get your dick sucked by someone who dyed their hair the same colour as mine and try not to think about the last time we were together. You stare at my letters in the black box in your closet, sighing with relief that the girl who always had more words will never make you feel so much ever again. But you’ll never throw the box away. I know what’s in there: a red ribbon, a candle, a conch shell, pressed-flowers, stacks of my scrawling cursive you learnt to be fluent in. They reek of the perfume I wear, Moonlight something, you’d recognize it on a storefront shelf but cannot recall the name right now. But you remember. You confess silently, you begrudgingly admit it: I was right. It’ll never be like that again. Kids underwater, nobody will ever be like us again.

By Lenna Suminski

I grew up around forests, things change when time passes and people get older and muddier. To the right of my house that my mother’s mother built on top of her mother’s bones, there used to be a road that led to nowhere. I learned to bike down that dead end, howling like wolves, armed with pink plush handlebars and not-so-flashy training wheels. They built a bridge across that 

valley and unrooted all my grandfather’s bamboos. Now teenagers do motorcycle tricks down my street and they had to build up a higher fence on the bridge because people kept taking their leaps of faith. Courage and solitude comes in many forms. I used to swim in the creek they decomposed in. 

I am not allowed to run barefoot across dandelions anymore. 

But before all this death, there had to be life. This is not a story about growing up, I’ve hardly ever grown. 

I want to tell you about a tree, before the bridge, before the fences. The tree was tall, expansive, wise, and giving. Just across from my window, it sprung white flowers over and over again every spring. My mother could not bake but she’d make tea from the fancy rose Earl Grey we’d get from the city every other Saturday. I made daisy chains and swung from its branches. The day before it was cut down–this older-than-any-bridge tree–I saw my mother and my father kiss for the very last time. 

Tree-climbing was a talent of mine, my first and only nickname was ‘xiao monkey’ (small monkey). I have never fallen. My feet will forever be rough and tough from my refusal to wear shoes. 

My ama, my mother’s mother, taught me everything I knew. She’d seen more death than me. The house across from ours used to be a pond to catch frogs and catfish in. Her tiny frame grew stubbornly, like the pink flower weeds she taught me how to peel and eat, when nothing but tea came from the red dirt of her mountain land. 

My agong, my mother’s father, was more like me than anyone would like to admit. He died when I was too young to understand his empathy. I used to detest holding his rough, tough hands. He planted a tree – well, many other trees too. But he planted a tree for my mother, Mayflower Tree. It was taller than my window. I’d learn to climb its ridges down and over the fence to see my high school boyfriend at a party many bridges away. 

He planted it for her, it’s been seven years since he was suffocated by cancer and the tube but his tree snowed white flowers across my home-built-on-bones for eternity. Only in May, he gave us

remembrance. In second grade we read a poem about mayflowers and I picked the most pristine ones from my yard and brought it to school. I’d never been more proud. 

These are my flowers. It came from my mother’s tree. Inhale their loveliness. 

I did not cry when he died, slowly and disgustingly. But I wallowed in agony the winter following the buddhist lotus-flower that we made and burned for him, when ama and mama cut down the Mayflower tree, and all the other trees. 

They will grow back, Lenna. 

No, it will never be the same. 

When I was nine, my classmates presented in excitement a dying baby black crow that had fallen from our school yard’s tree. They herded around it like vultures, gawking, squawking, overwhelmed by our pure biological voyeurism. Ponytails and buzzed heads and scraped knees crowding the crows body. When they all left I held the baby bird in my lavender-printed white dress. I banged on every door and skipped my classes, nobody really had the time to entertain my silliness of trying to save a dying thing. 

I laid against the tree of its nest and we looked at each other until it died. I whispered some lullaby, I’d never been a good singer so I told it the story of trees. Then I laid with its body, its hair as black as mine, listening to the tea trees and the red dirt that was never rich enough to grow anything but bamboo and weeds. 

It was the closest I’d ever been to death. I’ve hardly grown since. I talked about the mayflowers and crossed my heart like it was a prayer. In the name of memory and belief, the closest I’d ever been to God.

By Lenna Suminski

He stands there, clad in an armoury of French-pressed linen suits approved by Vogue just last month trying desperately to prove to himself he has now risen to be a man. His contradictions of mind and matter have always entertained me to a giggling slump and while he imitates this New York summer weather with his trickling yellow hair and drizzling dress, his tragic posture evokes a precise maternal instinct from me – peculiar strands of love not even summoned by my own daughter.

He forces me to speak: “I certainly am awfully glad to see you again.”

…

At this dusty time of the year the flowers and trees drifted from other summers. The peculiar scene of pine needles evoked memories of roads that cradled the happier suns of a long time ago. The road not taken taunts me with the precise incisions of surgeons or the delicate tuning-fork of a Swiss watchmaker.

As he stares across the water in a rare moment of stillness, I bade Jay to recall our wistful nights of a misty time in 1917, our demonstrations of romance disasterly vivid, now creeping around the edges of my mind and escaping the extensions of my fingertips. All of that seems more instant than this artificial carnival of love in this garden’s pungent perfumery and his purposeful delineation of the Fay family clock.

Do you remember…the night you gave me a birthday party and you were a young lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom painted white? I ask him in a silly whisper in my imagination…it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best…I confessed and I confess now, that that was the first time I ever said that in my life.

We were walking down Pleasant 6th Street when the leaves were falling…the sidewalk that led up to my ivy-plagued back door was bleached with moonlight, below it lay my carefully placed ladder that stretched and slithered around the illumination of my father’s study and towards the dark window of my room. You eyed it with suspicion or with interest, I could not tell.

As you approached with alarming ease and confidence I shut my eyes to reduce my static heart and mind to just the sense of you…You smelled like new goods, being close to you, my face in the space between your ear and stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserve of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambricks and linen and luxury bound in bales. You and your pale aloofness of yellow hair and lavender eyes, you were without a doubt the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I interrogated myself for days afterwards – I wonder if you ever realized my anxiety – your foolish bravery and selfish justice selected by you for just the two of us…You were a boy, an educational feature; an overture to romance which no young lady should be without.

Now I see that you are what you wanted us to become, and still I cannot untangle James from Jay. It would be unfair to blame you for fulfilling your own manifested destiny, the same as I did with Fay and Buchanan. But what are you trying to do now? Seeing me here, when we are already what we dreamed for each other?

The world offers men the possibility of carelessness and caricatured romance so they can zealously proclaim it to be ambition, one that is gracefully extended from the rusted palms of God himself – the majestic emergence of his creation designed to bless its creators with the emblem of immortality. It was exciting enough for me, in the summer of 1917, to be close to the ones that could devour all of our youth’s potential. I will admit, school was not the belle of my attention that year. There were too many soldiers in town and I passed my time going to dances – always in love with somebody, fast-pacing and slow-swaying all night, and carrying on my school work just with the idea of finishing it.

After that kiss, you were to me a nail in my palm, and that same bloodied flesh on a big blue book bound by braille. In that kiss the incarnation was complete. Though I will admit perhaps it is unfair to equate my sacrifices of femininity and chastity that summer all onto you, I still cling onto the life – of you and me far away on a rowboat in the middle of a stormy sea, bobbing with the pressure of nature instead of civilization and kept steady by your hands and my hair and our…dream? That vision of us and more importantly of Daisy Fay, whipping hair tucked behind my ear with hard-earned calloused palms, I will preserve with delusion in a third dimension.

…

At 23, I have done an excellent job at imitating my mother’s lifelessness, and glazed, impressionable eyes. I offer Tom as she had with my father, life, life, life, and ensuring Fay immortality in flesh and blood. Buchanan will live on forever while your Daisy Fay drifts away across the waters. Should I feel sorry that I wasted my tenderness for another name, for another man’s athanasia?

All of me, an Athenian temple, flying into the wind as pulverized specks from my wasted decaying acropolis, existing only to symbolize a light ahead for your Odyssey. Mothers and daughters alike, paralyzed by the abysmal pillar dug in the pit of our stomachs, striking through in between our ribs and reaching for the narrow keyhole up our throats and to our cherry pink always-agape mouths.

I spit out words but all that comes are tears. I tell you, I wanted to give you life, I promised you, I wanted…to give you an alms for your dreaming dazing self. What more of me is there to give now?

Don’t you think I was made for you? I used to feel like you had me carved out or sewn up—and I was plucked from the third dimension of your mind—to be worn, I still want you to wear me, like a watch-charm or a stitch on the inside of your fraying cufflinks. Do you still smell of pencils and sometimes of tweed? Of cigarettes, wedged way down between your fingers? Thumbs still fiddling and bloody from your unfulfilled knocking and picking…

I try and fight the dull pang of resentment that someone else closer to you knows all of your details, to think your rough sea-borne hands were now leading others than me into those cooler regions which you inhabited alone. I should feel happy for you, but you’re still sitting next to me, and I am only a girl equipped with only my meagre education of waltz and folding handkerchiefs. A handkerchief now being unfolded from your heart and directed by your thumbs to swipe away the rain and all its drizzling.

Nick peeks his head out in embarrassment and probably more out of boredom and breaks the moment all up apart: “It stopped raining.”

“Has it? What do you think of that? It stopped raining.” He repeats it back towards me.

“I’m glad, Jay.” I say to convince nobody.

While I mourn the loss of privacy and memory in the foams of the rain, I cover my tone in an upbeat song and promise him if he comes back, if we go back, I will make the jasmines bloom and all the trees come out in a dazzling flower. I will pinch every pine needle and rip and dye the willow leaves orange or red and in the rain’s shadowy shelter there will be clouds to eat and I will let you play with my hair while I trace back the roads along your palm.

Image credit: mymodernmet.ru