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Childhood

Nova Mladenovic

    The atmosphere weighs about 5.15?1018 kilograms. Do you wanna know what else weighs that heavy? C’mon, scoot closer, or you can’t hear me. So. Words do, for example, or the human heart, which is a pretty funny thing to say considering how you can crush it with things like neglect, or rejection. It’s very easy to do that, eerily easy.
    But, for me, words hold the most weight in a world where everyone dreams of flying up, up so high until you can touch the stars with no earth tethering you home. Let me tell you a story about weighted words.
    I am a daughter. I am a son. I am the child of my mother and father. They say you should never look a gift horse in the mouth, but I do. The gift was my name, a thing given to me after my birth, and it was bound to me by blood. Was. Is. Not now.
    I call myself Nova, like the birth of galaxies in my cupped palms. It suits me, I think. Me and my writer hands, relentlessly searching for the next best topic to tear apart with my teeth. Do you know what else gets torn apart by teeth and hands? Marriages. It’s very easy, too. When men don’t have enough words to throw into their wife’s faces anymore, they simply throw their punches at them. Easy.
    It happened to me, once. The hearing of a slap, eliciting the same sound like the means of greeting between young adults. A slap, like a very tiny thunderstorm encased in four empty-white walls. A slap, like the sudden dash on your once pristine page, or the interruption during your sentence. Many things can be written about, but not many people have the words to. I am one of those people.
    The truth takes guts to tell, and the spilling of red. To tell the truth is to kill its receiver. The truth works with the laws of war and, therefore, animals. The language of war is to say something no one wants to hear, no matter how swept-under-the-rug it may be. So, when the rug gets lifted, the family does everything they can to push it - you, by extension - under it again. No one asks if you suffocate even more than usually.
    This one answers why I don’t have many huge rugs in my apartment. I always think, what if he finds me and makes me hide away again, his sickly, helpless, fag of a daughter?
    This is why I like tiny rugs. I can’t fit beneath them, and someone is always going to find me.
    Anyways. Where do you want to go grab dinner?

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