the life cycle of the sun

SOPHIA PELAEZ the life cycle of the sun

Her room has no bed. It has no books in its bookshelves, no clothes in its wardrobe.

As she stands in the doorway, her only companion is the falling dust made visible by the afternoon light pouring in from her window. She sees all the chips in the paint and all the cracks in the hardwood floor and her heart grows to the size of an elephant.

We sat at the edge of my bed, on top of a freshly washed floral comforter with our backs against a lilac wall that was plastered with the posters of bands whose members I was sure would one day lock eyes with me in a sea of fans at their concert and immediately fall in love.

“Lils, do you want to go rollerskating this Friday? I know Luisa and them were thinking of going. We can just meet them there.”

She always made plans—and thank God for her.

I hadn’t been roller skating in years, and the last time I went, I ended up with more bruises than I knew how to count—which, to be fair, I couldn’t quite count past five— but the memory of scraped purple knees and swollen feet was never a fun one to recount. Oh, but that didn’t matter.

If your friends jumped off of a cliff, would you? The second they suggested it, I’d have run to the edge of the cliff and done a backflip off of the hanging dirt.

“Yeah! I have my permit test in the afternoon, but if we’re going like sometime after six, I’ll be there for sure.”

She beamed.

“Oh, no okay, that’s perfect, we’re probably going later anyway. My parents are out of town, do you think your mom could drive us?”

When she looked at you, you were her world.

“I’ll ask, but I think it should be fine!” My voice rose at the sentence’s end, piping up, becoming another attempt to make myself taller so I’d be able to reach her eyes. But she never looked down, never at me, there was always something else ahead, something and someone else waiting for her.

And we never really ended up going. But the idea of having a tomorrow together was all I needed.

She kept every postcard she was sent. She kept every letter, packed with a barely legible cursive that ran from hole punch to margin, that she was given. She kept the tickets from movies they saw together and the receipts from their weekend outtings. She held onto it all and displayed it on her wall like a university diploma.

But now her walls are empty and every box is filled.

She clings and remembers and dwells and collects.

“You should really give yourself more credit. You’re one of the hardest workers I know, but literally nothing is ever good enough for you.”

We were sophomores in high school. All I could think about was how our senior year was inching closer and closer, and yet I’d done little to make anything of myself that a middle-aged white man mulling through the applications of teens desperate to be let into their overpriced institution would consider noteworthy.

Maybe she took notice that my polished nails were bare and jagged and chewed down until there was more skin on my nail bed than nail or that my black hair was thinning and littered with gray strands.

I think, over time, I started counting on her to take notice.

She took me by the hands as we sat across each other on the floral comforter. My hands were in hers, and she leaned in, closer.

I had this urge, this impulse, to pull away. I could feel anything and everything in my body, every food I ate that day churned and jumped in my stomach and all of the heat in the room found its way to my palms.

“You have so many people who are so proud of you—me included.”

Her eyes met mine.

“You’re a star.”

But it’s been two years since you came by her house. She hung onto the stray threads of your hand-painted lightwash denim jacket, and you couldn’t even remember to greet her on her birthday. Or maybe she never told you the day. Maybe it was her fault. I got my driver’s license exactly two weeks ago. It was two in the morning on a Thursday, and she had just been broken up with. I was the first person she told, she said to me over the phone. She didn’t know what else to do.

I rushed out of my bedroom and into my dad’s beaten-down Toyota Prius, hoping I wouldn’t be responsible for another dent on its passenger car door.

Then we came back to my house. We sat on my bed, and I held her, and I told her if he couldn’t see your worth he didn’t deserve you, he was toxic, she was in the right, she did nothing wrong, things will be okay, she was better off without him. I ran my hands through her hair as she wept.

She told me she loved me.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you in my life.”

She told me I was different, that she had never felt this deeply about a friend before. I felt the same.

I was eager to reciprocate; I was overflowing with admiration.

She made me want to be bolder. She took steps without caring where she fell. She was always smarter than me—and she knew that—and she’d win any sort of debate we got into with ease. She spoke with a confidence I could never emulate. She led a life I could never live.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you either.”

It is the last day of June.

Every plushie she shoved under her bed after she turned fourteen (but would rather die than throw away) filled the brim of a cardboard box. She had packed every dust-coated yearbook, every AP class notebook, every auntie-gifted dress she never lost enough weight to fit into, every novel with a broken spine.

None of it was useless, nothing ever was. Maybe, she thinks, she’ll find a use for them one day.

Outside, her dad has the car running. She takes one last look.

I miss you and I miss you.