nicole leona smith
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TATWIEL || eight

3/30/2021

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Picture
dear woman eight,

we were two passing ships in the day.

day, not night, because i think we saw everything about each other clearly for a split second. a brilliant flash of lightning in a sea filled with fish. after a deafening crack, and before months of silence, we let it all hang out. i want to learn to keep it all out, like you. to swim in the sea and let weeds tickle my toes, rather than float above it all in something made of steel and still be afraid of sharks.

when i was six, an older boy who was sitting in the school hallway yelled at me as i walked by, "have you always been fat?" as if i'd been on the earth for hundreds of years, or knew what fat meant. i remember my mom's eyes when i asked her at home later.

you waited a day or so before answering the last question i asked you, because you were thinking about it, plus also falling in love with someone. i admire how you sit inside of your life. have you always sat inside of your life? what would your mother say?

love,
​n

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2020 Reads

12/31/2020

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happy spin around the sun, friends. congratulations on making it through. here is what i was grateful to sink my brain into this year -- mostly fiction, some memoir and essays, a handful of poetry and plays, lots of beautiful work by inspiring friends. listed in order read (not ranked), with some of my most devoured/cherished compiled in the gallery below. i wish each and every one of you the words you're looking for in 2021. may this next revolution be more sparkly than dumpster fire. 

​love, n.

2020 Reads
  1. The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
  2. Five Wives by Joan Thomas
  3. Something Bright Then Holes by Maggie Nelson (poetry)
  4. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie 
  5. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
  6. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
  7. The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking
  8. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
  9. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay (essays)
  10. The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
  11. Small Victories by Anne Lamott (essays)
  12. Crudo by Olivia Laing
  13. The Boat People by Sharon Bala
  14. Bunny by Mona Awad
  15. Hunger by Roxane Gay (essays)
  16. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
  17. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
  18. The Perfect Mother by Aimee Molloy
  19. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
  20. The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
  21. Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
  22. The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan
  23. Recipe for a Perfect Wife by Karma Brown
  24. The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
  25. Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
  26. Bone Cage by Catherine Banks (play)
  27. Incidental Interventions by Elena Ferrante (essays)
  28. Room by Emma Donoghue
  29. Motherhood by Sheila Heti 
  30. Wilder Girls by Rory Power
  31. the innocents by Michael Crummey
  32. Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson 
  33. Precious Energy by Shannon Bramer (poetry)
  34. Baddie One Shoe by Natalie Meisner (poetry)
  35. Long Bright River by Liz Moore
  36. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
  37. This Is Agatha Falling by Heather Nolan 
  38. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
  39. Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
  40. A Sudden Sun by Trudy J. Morgan Cole
  41. Everything I Never Told You by Celest Ng
  42. Morning in the Burned House by Margaret Atwood (poetry)
  43. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
  44. I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid 
  45. City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
  46. Reproduction by Ian Williams
  47. Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba 
  48. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout 
  49. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides 
  50. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite 
  51. almost no memory by Lydia Davis (short stories)
  52. SHOUT by Laurie Halse Anderson (poetry)
  53. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  54. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  55. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
  56. Flannery by Lisa Moore
  57. The Stand by Stephen King
  58. All We Knew But Couldn’t Say by Joanne Vannicola
  59. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
  60. Spawn by Marie-Andree Gill (poetry)
  61. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
  62. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  63. Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval
  64. Weather by Jenny Offill
  65. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante 
  66. All My Mother’s Lovers by Ilana Masad
  67. Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
  68. The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
  69. Braised Pork by An Yu
  70. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong 
  71. Indelicacy by Amina Cain
  72. Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh 
  73. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin 
  74. Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill 
  75. Milkman by Anna Burns
  76. Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman
  77. Dark Matter by Blake Crouch 
  78. Untamed by Glennon Doyle
  79. Policing Black Lives by Robyn Maynard 
  80. Diary of a Mad Housewife by Sue Kaufman 
  81. All I Ask by Eva Crocker
  82. Poems by Elizabeth Bishop (poetry)
  83. The Essential P.K. Page by P.K. Page (poetry) 
  84. Stay Where I Can See You by Katrina Onstad
  85. Dream Work by Mary Oliver (poetry)
  86. After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones (short stories)
  87. That Forgetful Shore by Trudy J. Morgan Cole
  88. This One Because of the Dead by Laure Baudot (short stories)
  89. The Hidden Messages in Water by Masaru Emoto 
  90. Rabbit Foot Bill by Helen Humphreys 
  91. The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter
  92. The Wives by Tarryn Fisher 
  93. The Crying Book by Heather Christle
  94. The Company We Keep by Frances Itani
  95. The Last Wife by Kate Hennig (play)
  96. The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall 
  97. Wenjack by Joseph Boyden 
  98. life of the party by Olivia Gatwood (poetry)
  99. The Book of Sensations by Sheri-D Wilson (poetry)
  100. Blud by Rachel McKibbens (poetry)
  101. Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta (short stories)
  102. Disfigured by Amanda Leduc 
  103. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 
  104. Trapsongs by Shannon Bramer (plays)
  105. My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell ​
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June 2020 Book Recs

6/2/2020

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30 books to purchase by Black and Queer authors, collectively recommended. Novels, plays, poetry, essays, nonfic. Mostly Canadian, mostly contemporary, but a little bit of everything. Click photo for link to purchase, and please feel free to add to the list via the comments below.
​Reproduction by Ian Williams
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
The Flood by Leah Simone Bowen
No Crystal Stair by Mairuth Sarsfield
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo 
Policing Black Lives by Robyn Maynard
Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis
What We All Long For by Dionne Brand
The Book Of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
3 Cities by Whitney French
We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
All My Mother’s Lovers by Ilana Masad
You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson
Little Fish by Casey Plett
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow
This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins
Wow, No Thank You. by Samantha Irby
The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
Giovanni’s Room by James Bladwin
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
The Other Side of the Game by Amanda Parris
Junebat by John Elizabeth Stintzi
Machine Without Horses by Helen Humphreys
A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A. Brown
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
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TATWIEL || seven

4/27/2020

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Picture
dear woman seven,

i have a hard time with you. not because i'm jealous, though i absolutely am. i am jealous of your intelligence, your style, your talent, your confidence, the way you are admired, etc. i have a hard time with you, but not because of my jealousy. i have a hard time with you because i don’t like you. i don't like you, but i love you. in some ways, the softest part of my heart is reserved for you. it's not big, but it's deep. the cushiest corner of a king-sized bed, my love for you is tormenting in its elusiveness. it's a large lesson to learn in its entirety, that one does not have to like a person to love them. in fact, one can actively dislike a person and love them. you're a small child wrapped inside the skin of a difficult woman. you're still learning, which i do say patronizingly, because it gratifies the child my skin shrouds to say “she’s still learning." but i think it's also true. you are still learning, and you always will be because you are curious, which i admire. i think when you learn to stop letting your insecurity turn you mean, you will rule the world, and i will be so jealous.

i hate you because you are parts of me i hate, and i love you because you are parts of me i hate, and that's the greatest piece of hope i've ever been gifted.

love,
n


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TATWIEL || six

3/31/2020

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Picture
dear woman six,

you are a rock-face, i think. as in the face of a rock. i've thought a lot about what you are. a tree, i thought at first. a lake. maybe a stone. but a tree is too breakable and a lake is too malleable and a stone is too precious. you are sturdy, and you oversee. oversea, too.

what i think is so great about you is that you have been shaped by the wind, but extremely slowly, over a very long time. you are alone, but in a way that welcomes others to come and picnic; to spend a day in your world, as long as they make it back to their own by dark. if they don't, you become dangerous. 

when bits of you break off, they become something else. hazardous. but also: sand for lovers to tramp through, a piece for another person to collect. 

you are solitude, and especially now, you are who we watch. we want to be sturdy. we want to exist after the end of the world. we want to evolve.

love, n. 

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TATWIEL || five

2/16/2020

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Picture
dear woman five,

the first thing i wondered about you was how you met your wife. i was sure you had a wife. i liked your glasses. i appreciated the nerves you obviously felt in the situation. i felt like if you saw me in the crowd of 400 people, saw me seeing you, we might be friends. old habits die hard. this was a fresh start for me, but still i sat very still in the buzzing room and watched the way your right foot tapped, hoping you might feel me thinking you were interesting in all of your drab. fascinating in your very plain blazer. i had a deference to difference and immediately wanted to learn from your crooked tie, messy hair, peanut butter breath. you had toast crumbs on your collar. "okay," you said to the room, glance passing very quickly over the human looking too intensely in your direction, "hello."

i wondered what led you to dedicate your life to teaching other peoples' meanings, and what made you decide it was better to ask than to answer. there are no answers, is what you taught me, but in a glass-half-full kind of way, even though you never cracked a smile. basically, if nothing is true, i learned in your class, so is everything.

i became obsessed with your brain. your knowledge. your shyness. the fact that you were reserved and removed and dedicated to what was on the page. i took all of your classes and racked up so many philosophy electives, i had to take another year of undergrad just to fulfil my actual degree's requirements. we never chatted face-to-face, but i poured myself into your assignments. i got 97s and 98s. i learned all about assumptions. perspective. the shifting nature of truth. i became an expert.

years after graduation, maybe five or six, you ordered a coffee from me. you were with friends, talking and laughing. they guffawed as you cracked jokes about your ex husband, your kids' dad, whom you were "finally kicking to the curb!" you were the life of the sunday morning party. you were bubbling, ebullient, colourful. a tall handsome man with grey stubble and a smirk had his hand on your lower back, and you wore something expensive-looking, ordering the fanciest drink we had. No this, no that, extra whip, low fat - and then: "hey!" you said, kind of loudly. "do we know each other????" 

our eyes locked, and i laughed. you weren't taken aback. i couldn’t remember your name, and all at once i wondered if i ever knew it. "i'm not sure," i said, handing you your change.

​you told me to keep it, and i always will.

love,
n

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TATWIEL || four

1/22/2020

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Picture
dear woman 4,

words shape you into something, and i don't want to see your face, so i will keep this brief.

i remember when you first appeared, gliding across the white floor. it's a visceral memory, fight flight or freeze.  i will never say your name aloud. i will never conjure you, though maybe i should. maybe i can. maybe i have.

i know what you sound like, and i know your dress. the  buttons down your back, round and black. the lace along your edges. the bun atop your head. i know the shatter that reverberates before you. i know your name. you whispered it to me the first time. i will never speak it.
 
i don't know your face. you are a skulking entity without features, something rubbed out; smudged by the squishy palm of a third-grader, the meaty part of a hand writing the next line of a story. you're black and white and lead all over. garishly grey. illogical and inevitable. more than i want you to be. stay where you are. i hope you will stay where you are.

stay in the hospital room, and in the gorge.
stay on the train tracks.
somewhere in the sky during the blackout of 2003.
stay in the nightmare, at your canvas.
continue painting something mundane.
a jar of honey, a bowl of fruit.
keep your back to me.
stay at the top of the stairs; the edge of the cliff before you push.
stay in the  before and after.
stay sharply featureless, peripherally centred.
stay away.
but please don't leave. 

love,
n


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#TATWIEL || three

1/9/2020

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Picture
dear woman 3,

last time we were together you called me an anchor, which i LOVE because it means in some universe i'm grounded instead of floating.

i think you are superwoman, but it just seems to be in your bones.  in your seams. not that i think your life is effortless. i think it's full of effort, actually. but what you teach me is that effort is different than struggle, and you are a maker. a maker of your life, a maker of your days.

we talked about stress once, and you said you don't feel it. you said you don't feel stress, and i wonder  how that's possible when your days are full and your nights are full, and when you're not doing something you're doing everything. "i don't know," you said. "why? what makes you feel stressed?"

it takes at least a decade to learn to truly only do what you want, you said. practice it now, every day.

i think you are the definition of practice because you make perfect, and i think you have gorgeous hands. you're a gorgeous person, but when i think of you, i see your hands - capable of sculpting a statue, or a healthy dinner or the day of a friend. you take up space by making room and add to the universe without overloading it. you say no and life says yes. to want means to do. to have means to deliver. to sing means to open your mouth. that's the next thing i see when i picture you - your smiling teeth. thanks is really what i want to say. thank you for existing in a way that all of us could, all of us should, if only we would stop letting everything happen to us and start remembering we have feet. (hands! teeth!)

love, n

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BOOKS 2019

12/27/2019

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some old, some new, most borrowed, some blue. some re-reads, a few forthcoming. not ranked, listed in order read. a handful of very faves pictured below. thank you for your words, thank you for your recs! wishing each of you the words you need in 2020. 

  1. Depression and Other Magic Tricks by Sabrina Benaim (poetry)
  2. Nobody Cares by Anne T. Donahue (essays)
  3. Letters From Mikey by Marilyn Mackay and Lenore Berscheid (short fiction)
  4. Bang Bang by Kat Sandler (play)
  5. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
  6. Brazil Square by Berni Stapleton (play)
  7. Half Spent Was The Night by Ami Mckay
  8. Little One by Hannah Moscovitch (play)
  9. In This World by Hannah Moscovitch (play)
  10. Other People’s Children by Hannah Moscovitch (play)
  11. The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
  12. A Stranger in the House by Shari Lapena
  13. The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
  14. When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman
  15. The Haunting of Margaret Duley by Berni Stapleton (play)
  16. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King
  17. love, life by Berni Stapleton
  18. Push by Sapphire
  19. The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews
  20. The Immoralists by Chloe Benjamin
  21. A Director Prepares by Ann Bogart (essays)
  22. Nocturne by Helen Humphreys
  23. Final Girls by Riley Sager
  24. The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O’Neill
  25. The Deserters by Pamela Mulloy
  26. City Still Breathing by Matthew Heiti
  27. Women Talking by Miriam Toews
  28. Lullabies For Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill
  29. Brass Rubbings by Gordon Pinsent (play)
  30. Notes Toward Recovery by Louise Ells
  31. Girly Muckle and the Queerhands by Berni Stapleton
  32. Sing to It by Amy Hempel (short stories)
  33. Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis (short stories)
  34. Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss
  35. The Outsider by Stephen King
  36. Machine Without Horses by Helen Humphreys
  37. Turn of the Screw by Henry James
  38. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
  39. I Am I Am I Am by Maggie O’Farrell
  40. The Seven deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
  41. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
  42. Encore by Alexis Koetting
  43. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
  44. Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
  45. The Girls by Emma Cline
  46. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
  47. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
  48. In-Between Days by Teva Harrison
  49. Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman
  50.  Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
  51. Snowflower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
  52. Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott
  53. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
  54. The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn
  55. Leaving Earth by Helen Humphreys
  56. Body & Soul, edited by Susan Scott (short stories)
  57. Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood (short stories)
  58. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
  59. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
  60. Normal People by Sally Rooney
  61. On Writing by Stephen King
  62. Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
  63. Summer of my Amazing Luck by Miriam Toews
  64. The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeny
  65. When Will It Stop Hurting by Glenn Cameron (short memoir)
  66. The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman
  67. Mustard by Kat Sandler (play)
  68. Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella
  69. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
  70. Elevation by Stephen King
  71. Theft by Finding by David Sedaris (journals)
  72. These Wings by Kim Fahner (poetry)
  73. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
  74. Worry by Jessica Westhead
  75. Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
  76. Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield
  77. The Art of Dying by Sarah Tolmie (poetry)
  78. There There by Tommy Orange
  79. All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda
  80. Little Fish by Casey Plett
  81. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  82. Brother by David Chariandy
  83. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
  84. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
  85. Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
  86. The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
  87. Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
  88. Maid by Stephanie Land
  89. Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline
  90. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
  91. A Safe Girl to Love by Casey Plett
  92. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
  93. The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood
  94. The Seas by Samantha Hunt
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#TATWIEL || two

12/18/2019

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Picture
dear woman 2,

it was the way your bathing suit was too big on your bum. it was the way the pink spandex of it sagged that made me think, more than anything else that day: uh oh. 
 
“are you here with your daddy?” best friend and i asked you, almost at the same time. we didn’t need to talk about it. it was in how you ran into the sauna with us. it was in how he followed you and rolled his eyes and said you were “6 going on 16” and you corrected him. it was in how you corrected him, mostly. “no i’m not,” you said. i’m 5.”
 
“right,” he said and chuckled, following you again after you ran back out of the sauna. “kids.” he rolled his eyes and looked at best friend. she had a body like a movie star. like natalie portman or sandra bullock in the net. i was wearing a one piece i got from walmart. it was from the plus-sized section and had a wraparound skirt. i didn’t know it at 14, but it was a kind of super power. 

best friend and i went back into the hot tub part of the pool, which felt cold after the sauna. the whirlpool part. “that was—” was all i managed to get out before you swam up to us. waded, really. the water was low. just your height. your hair was brown and stringy and your fingers were pruned and your nails were painted sparkly blue. “wanna play with me?” you asked and threw a ball at us.
 
“sure” we said together, dodging the blow.
 
we threw the ball back and forth.
 
“are you having fun?” best friend asked after a few seconds.
 
“yeah!” you screamed, giggling, jumping up and down in the water. your bathing suit should have fit you properly. instead it flooded around your collarbones when you dunked and exposed your chest when you catapulted. "up up and away!" you shouted. your skin was pale and you had blue veins running in all directions. you splashed best friend, and i followed the water and saw him from the corner of my eye. he was in the sauna again, this time watching us from the little window.
 
i pinched best friend’s thigh, and she didn’t have to follow my gaze.
 
“i know” she said to me, and then to you: “are you here with your daddy?”
 
“nooooo,” you said, as if you wanted us to keep guessing. you were drooling, which was barely noticeable if not for a particular shine on your chin. spit mixed with chlorine.
 
best friend looked at me.
 
“your uncle?” i ventured.
 
“noooooo,” you said again, dunking underwater. i looked back over my shoulder. he wasn’t in the window anymore.
 
you burst back out.
 
“hey!” best friend said to you – too loudly – when you resurfaced. 

what if he was behind us? i thought. what if he heard? “shhh” i said to best friend.
 
“hey,” she said again, quieter. “then who’s that guy you’re with?”
 
you laughed and laughed and spat water in my face. “i don’t know!” you giggled.
 
he opened the sauna door.
 
“you don’t know?” i said.
 
“what do you mean you don’t know?” best friend asked.
 
“i just met him!” you said. and then: “ahhh! monster!!!!”
 
you screamed, looking over best friend’s head at the man. you laughed again, pointing. “he said his name was peter cottontail!” you dunked back under the water just as he reached us.

“come on, hon!” he called after you. “come on! time to go!” he looked at us again. at best friend.  “thanks for watching her.”
 
we didn’t say a word, both of us frozen in the hot tub.
 
“kids, right?” he said again.
 
he walked over to the other side of the pool. we looked all around for you.
 
“where’d she go?” best friend said, not to me. “where’d she go?”
 
we didn’t see you burst back up. he disappeared too, into the crowd. we didn’t see you follow him. we didn’t see you follow us. we didn’t see you again.
 
“call if you want,” the adults said later. “call if you want, girls, but did she look distressed? can you describe the man? you have to be careful what you get yourself into. you have to be really sure. you know how kids are. you know how they like to play. what if it was just her dad and you ruin his life?”
 
i hope he was, and i hope we didn’t. ruin your life. i hope you got out from underwater, and  i hope you grew into your bathing suit. then i hope you grew up up and out of it. i'm sorry. 
 
love,
n

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