"Mythos" (Poetry Flashback)

In going through the archives of my creative writing courses in college, I found some pieces that were still interesting, so I figured I might post some here just to share. Here, then, is a poetry flashback: I wrote this in 2009 (19 years old).

Mythos

We’re sitting outside on the concrete,
a curbside by the mall parking lot
where the evening hunches mutely above the cars.
We’re only waiting for rides to rescue us
from ourselves, and each other—we, the wordless remnants
of a mutual group that had scattered
before the sun began to melt the last hours of this day.
You take sips from a bottle of flavored water
while I swallow my saliva.

We had eaten sand together once,
or tried to, pretended it was ice cream
sprinkled with bits of shining fairy dust
even as it slid through the cracks in our fingers
when we had the thin bones of eight-year-olds;
we had crushed the tissue flesh of clovers beside the school gym
and watched the green seep out,
smeared it across our ten-year-old nails
as if painting ourselves with leprechaun luck;
we had read spell books together when you fancied yourself Wiccan
with the illustrations held close to our twelve-year-old eyes,
thin, pale people inhaling the strength of potions –
and now we are both as quiet as the shock
that came with death five years ago, your father
clutching his chest in his empty apartment,
his tie crushed into the carpet.

We are silent like broken clock faces
and motionless like the people we never were;
statues with smooth, bland eyes, turned away.
The liquid of your drink flows slick over your tongue
as I try to make my mouth dry enough
to feel individual taste buds against my teeth,
gritty and hard as microscopic pebbles –
that sandy taste again, as if I could recapture it,
when some time before you lost the shine of fairy dreams
and began collecting your father’s old favorite soap,
we were our own myths.