Did you remember that afternoon after school? You caught me behind the school building. It was almost the end of the school year. You took my arm and tugged me into the shadow of the wall where we weren’t visible to the rest of the world. You pressed your body against mine. I remember your warmth from that afternoon. It scared me. My white scarf fluttered to the ground, and you stared at me as though you were going to consume me whole.

It wasn’t only you, though. I wanted to kiss you too. I wanted to feel your lips on mine. I had dreamed about it. So, I let my fingers touch your face. Feel your skin. I broke all the rules then, yours and mine. Moments stilled and pooled; the heat of your skin warmed me. But someone called your name. Then someone else called mine. We broke apart. You turned away. I picked up my scarf. You stifled a shudder. I took a breath.

We never spoke of it. That almost-kiss. It was as though it had never almost happened. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe I dreamed it up.

Some days grief catches us unaware. It strips away all our carefully constructed facades and leaves us as freshly hurt as we were when we first became wild. Our roads become impassable, and we cannot turn one damn page because our stories are stuck in that same rank darkness, and we cannot move, we cannot think, and we cannot be anything other than the pieces of what we once were.

Would giving specific names to our tragedies make you know us better? Get black paint then and mark us victims of rape, sexual, physical, and verbal abuse. Stalked. Sold. Made destitute. Abandoned. Hated. Silenced. Do these words make us more or less to you?

Some days we are so sad, we want to drown the world. Some days we are so angry, we want to set it on fire.

When we become wild, the first thing we do is throw ourselves away. Or rather, we throw away the pieces of us that remain after whatever tragedy that tries to define us occurs. Then we throw away all the people we held dear because, ultimately, these people failed us. After that, we unearth ourselves, carefully digging up the roots that we sank into the place we first called home. Last of all, we throw away time.

This is more difficult to do than it should be. Paheli never talks about the time she threw away. None of us do. But though it doesn’t show on our surfaces, our bodies record the passing of hours in different ways. Our smiles gradually get brighter, warmer, and even though we are the furthest from normal we will ever get, we start feeling like people again.

The French Quarter, the Spanish Half, and Eulalie

I.