By Kira Córdova
Hey,
Remember the kid that fell out of a barracks window cleaning the crown molding during basic training and crowned himself the President of the Skydiving Club, and they sent the whole corps an email saying it wasn’t a suicide attempt? He committed suicide last week.
A professional paper maché artist at the shipyard lent me a copy of Anne Carson’s Plainwater yesterday, and, oh. How tender the phrases after she passes them through a meat grinder. The young are so seldom kind. I almost blur my peripheral vision and forget the list of skills I wrote on my arm to ask my boss to teach me. I want to learn to weld.
Your roommate, who knew him, hadn’t told you, so I didn’t know he died when I thought, “it’s harder to kill yourself living in communal housing,” but stopped because they might call you to collect my shit. We were mopping. I tried not to drip ideation into the Fabuloso. The water turns lavender when we fold in all the dirt and shipyard grit, and it’s too beautiful to tint.
Remember when Mom saw a ghost in the basement? Her brother-in-law’s ashes weren’t on the bar shelf yet, but I’m pretty sure she saw him. Why else wouldn’t she tell Dad?
I know it doesn’t mean much, but I promise you I like the lavender.
I’m not going to haunt your basement.
Kira Córdova is an emerging writer working on an MFA in nature writing at Western Colorado University. Their essays have appeared in the Gunnison Country Times and Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. They post essayettes about working in living history at www.kirarambles.com and occasionally poems on their instagram, @kirarambles.
losing our grip on purpose 