For Tigerlily

Tigerlily,

Across the bathroom tiles, I've spread this memory, liquefied.  You told me once you were taught to shave, and even if you never were, you were.  We were.  We were taught how to give voice to this color-secret, the liquid truth, in long equations of additions and subtractions.

I cut.  My hair.

And it was a tragedy.

The scissors were my mother's, engraved with her name, and so it was in her name that I did it.  I parceled it into long offerings which poured bleak onto the tiled floor.  Subtraction, in these many hateful inches.

I wished I could have remained a Lost Boy, but Peter promised.  He promised to love us all through the hardships of first living as a hatchet-limbed boy of little speech, then changing in these grotesque inches into the wicked banishment of girlhood.

I cried, I remember.  I hyperventilated in the bathroom while he picked over his collection of Hustler and Playboy and drew the ubiquitous florals sufficiently labian.  I took the scissors, and cut my hair, squealing I don't want to die I don't want to die, and Peter was calm.  He was so calm, like he knew.  He let the inches fall, and we watched the pile for a long time without saying anything, like it was a pit of living snakes.

"It'll only hurt a little, Tig," he said to me, and his shadow nodded.

Peter always keeps his promises, through the broken ankle-straps and haphazard nail polish.  He loved us through each blunt scissor-stroke and rage of lace and ribbon.  We learned to shave, and then we stopped because he took us to the hotel together, and left us there without anything we could use to hurt ourselves.  The blossom expands, and then curls into itself.  Like detox.

He left us there, he said, until we could figure how to fly again.

-Tigerlily