The Lilac x The Student: “When I say becoming an expatriate is not one of my ambitions”

I mean I hate that I must leave home and wander new streets under the beams of another country’s moon to love home again. The familiar is becoming too familiar I say as Atta Boy leaps out from the speaker in my college dorm room singing stay close to home my lovely daring boy and the vocals smoothly fold and unfold in the nighttime like an easy lover but also like youth writhing on my bed, dying. And so I’m only being serious when I say that I must leave to cradle that youth to reclaim it but for now I’m in child’s pose on a picnic blanket next to my roommate who reads a book about a life in fishing and I am unremarkably aware of all the ants I may be crushing and suffocating underneath the weight of my folded legs as my back curves into a perpetual cycle of waiting for the sunlight to split me open so that I can bloom and when I finally roll over to my side I unexpectedly push into a hand I feel through the thin fabric of my clothing and my roommate says that my upper back is warm but that the lower is cold to the touch and I pick at blades of grass and one of them is sharp enough to leave a red scratch in the tender spot between two fingers. The road is too wild to mix it with blues my mother says but now I’m speeding on the freeway even though I don’t have a driver’s license and somewhere in the swooshing of cars is the sound of a trombone sliding in and out in gloomy sighs that vibrate with abandonment and doom the living and I wonder if speaking another tongue will drain it all into forgotten petals that drip from my lips and I wonder what will hit a naïve American jumping two inches outside the border and there is so much trombone spilling onto my lap as I hear my mother on rewind stay close to home my lovely daring girl my girl my girl.