Clothesline Avenues - Aura Peredia Garcia
I find myself stumped in a landscaped median. It comes in an instant, an empty plot of land splitting McKenzie Avenue in two. From its center, I stare at its beginning, the rounded edge. If I run down its distance, an eighth of a mile, the expansive plane becomes a single sharp point where I stand alone by a sign that says One Way.
I come back to it, time and time again, to remind myself that even in the reduction of others, living and dead, in the intersection between rural and urban, I still have to live with myself. It is a humid aspiration; it is a meadowed green, one that comes before I return my gaze to what I avoid: a tired love.
I lived in a house near McKenzie Avenue. Behind it, past the Colima barber shop, on Nevada Avenue, stood the house of a temporary friend from fourth grade. We bonded over LEGO Ninjago, pelted each other with lego bricks, until one day, he pulled a LEGO helicopter from his backpack and said —If you ever want to give it back, come to the house with the blue door.
Showing my mother my new gift she told me —Never take an offering. To return it, I walked out the backdoor of my home, crossed the dewy grass yard, collected pockets of dirt under the soles of my shoes, and maundered into the alleyway of misshapen cement, boxed helicopter in hand, apprehensive, hoping it’ll fly me away.
When I found the blue door, he opened it. His hair was both shaggy and short. He asked me if I wanted to play Super Smash Bros Melee. My instincts say: yes, of course. I followed him through shadowed wooden floors to an unkept living room couch. I stepped over his laundry, a vivid green shirt he’d worn the day before. Sitting down, I stared at the distress: a freshly eaten banana peel at the edge of a coffee table, a blank piece of paper adorned by a sharpened pencil, and his shirt, again, dirty and used.
He broke my gaze by handing me a controller— let's play, he grinned. Not understanding which button helped me move, he threw me, beat me, hung me over an oblivion. While eating another banana he told me —write it down. Overwhelmed with the banana, the paper, and his shirt on the floor I ask— what. He repeated— The controls, write down the controls.
I only wrote the button used to protect before the door received a knock. It was my sister, and behind her? my mother, father, siblings, all holding hands. I was reminded I must never take an offering. Leaving, he held out the helicopter again, I said— I’m fine, goodbye.
Now, in the desolate landscaped median I find myself transforming the grass into an illusion where love exists. An interaction beyond the day I began to avoid the street he lived on. It is the only place where I can fight the shame I bear. So, I imagine him again, something that could have been, the sensation of connection, an action for care. I would pick up the clothes from the shadowed wooden floor, find a wash basin, and rinse them clean. In the empty plot of land I would plant wooden spikes, attach white ropes to it, and create a clothesline.
In my mind, I create transportation. I find an imagined love in imagined clotheslines. On the plain terrain of grass the clothesline of love linen shirts sway until a sprinkler breaks and converts itself into a geyser of self-actualization; the mode of transportation for a wanted embrace. In this haven we would play tag around the diameter, run through the fabric, scare one another, find each other. Then, when the streetlights turn on and the sprinklers begin, we’d dry our bodies off on the tarred streets. I’d watch the world as he sees it and recognize the world with him.
On a summer night, with the white linen sheets, I would ask him to transform the landscaped median into a movie theater where we project my favorite film, Where Is the Friend's House? (1987). We’d watch another child finding another friend, trying in another city, all in hopes of returning the homework he took with him by accident. We’d watch him run through forests, climb zigzagged hills, jump cracked pavement, only to never find the friend’s house.
On the clotheslines, I’d dry blueberry stamps for letters written and posted to him, titled The Friend’s House. The mailman will climb up a hill, through a valley of zigzagged paths, for a friend who will read the message stating—If I see you tomorrow, I will say hi, if I don’t see you tomorrow, I won’t say hi. Antiquated, the letters continue to ask, WHAT DID I SAY TO YOU on that night I refused the offering. The letters repeat themselves in writing: that to look back and stare at him from afar still means I am looking at the past. I look, not through him, not at him, not understood, but re-understood, reintroduced as an element that once was and now plays tag lovingly.
For matters of love, my mother told me I must do it myself, cave in the sheets between two of the ropes so they do not scrape the floor. In doing so, I create a tunnel of conversation with the lines of linen sheets who in humid aspirations tell me I am a realized body. A body who plays tag on McKenzie Avenue and repeats phrases of a love that can only be described as a string of nerves pulling itself from every part of the body into an unknown center that will eventually collapse.
—Let's go home, he’d say, once our bodies have dried. Then a sprinkler will break, a geyser will form, and I will learn: I am alone.
Staring at the geyser of self-actualization, I understand it is all a memory. One that comes from a child’s day in second grade where water sprouted upwards from a broken sprinkler across the street of my home. After some begging, my sister and I took turns letting the groundwater pummel the top of our craniums while my mother slathered shiny, silky, green aloe vera shampoo over my head and said— Accept this offering. Swishing the fingers through my scalp I focused on the digging of the sprinkler.
What holds true in the geyser of groundwater is the suffering from a tired love, a selfish love pursued and never met. One where two can feel safe in their skin. It is instinctual to follow but will those instincts be good? When really you need yourself to have an escalation of events separately remembered, only to ask again, ¿which of myself is better off existing?
I hope to one day forget this wanted love. To forget the selfish desire to be loved while I try to find a history in the running helicopters that fly over the landscaped median. To forget the pleading, the begging of someone to say my name while the air is still breathing, the space moving, and I have yet to understand the loss involved in love.
I glance at the landscaped median from its point, embarrassed that I made myself a reality and spent love on an audience that has never been there. I do not know how I want to be loved. He gave me a chance and put me into being. This chance keeps itself frightened through sickness. One where he’d remedy it by squeezing the temples of my head until my thoughts burst. Following it he’d put his fingers on the roof of my mouth and pull my body upwards so my mouth understands it can open itself in a love that does not involve another as the blueberry stamps cannot cover the cost of shipping.
Still, I want to find an I love you in the broken sprinkler whose water digs down to a reality seen through transportation, one where I receive a letter in response with a bunny that waves hi and by it the location to The Friend's House. It is all a love over flicking bodies, tangible items to end a life, elements to end the shower, fix the sprinkler, and dry the linen sheets; elements that force me to realize that I am still alone in a landscaped median believing that actualizing a friend in a sentence will sprout an invitation, so, hopefully, he can hand me a controller and I can lose to him again.
Aura Peredia Garcia is a fourth-year English major at Fresno State studying creative writing. She writes about memory, longing, and concepts of identity as a trans Chicanx woman. She has been published in Flies, Cockroaches and Poets and is currently working on her novella, Azul's Film.
