Summer Dispatch: St. Louis

Jasmine Wright

I didn’t like heat, so I was born on the coldest day of June. I was an hour late and missed the Tulsa rain. It rained the next morning, and I’ve missed it ever since.

I was born where summer winds collide to level homes on open plains. Where trucks chase after storms, and the boldest of us died beside the road. The creeks were dry, or the bridge was underwater, and people baked or froze in their homes. Tornadoes felled the trees; ice downed power lines.

People called it flat, but there were mountains near my home: large red rocks, cacti, crags, and valleys. You fell on your back once, into the cacti, and my dad picked spines from your skin. Watch your step at Baldy Point. The drop is long, and rocks slip.

I was born somewhere I had to leave. Your bedroom smelled of your mother’s cigarettes. I slept in a chair I shared with Meemaw’s ghost. I wanted to see my mom, so I was a night owl from the start. I watched her sleep and the TV flashed bright, blue. Some old murder case reenacted for the cameras, a recent cop chase marketed to suburbia. One day we’d have a house like that.

I used to wake up sweating when the air conditioner broke. I used to cut my hair like a boy; dressed like a boy. I played basketball by the reservoir with boys, and I acted like the boys. Everyone thought I was a faggot[1] but they rolled with it.

I knew what murder was and I knew my grandpa had been murdered and I knew it happened all the time. They found his beaten body in a ditch, naked, left to bleed out. I didn’t want to be murdered, but I wanted to be cut apart. I wanted my ribs to unfurl, my spirit to seep out and find another home. It was quiet at home, and I wanted a quiet death, and I was nine years old and bored.

I wanted to love, but I wanted to love like a girl, I wanted to love like how I imagined my mom could love. Like how I dimly remembered her love when I was three or four years old and we sat on my floor and she illustrated a little book about my fascination with the planets. She would have been twenty-two then.[2]

I wanted to look like the girls in my class, we were newly pubescent and I felt wrong all the time. I was on my knees in front of toilets and experimenting with kitchen knives and scissors and razor blades removed from their safeties. I cut myself between the ribs because that was where I felt it most, that was where I knew everything was meant to come out. It was a nightly habit. I wanted to be unrecognizable.[3]

I tried a lot of things to feel normal. I wrapped my hand around his cock when he told me to and let him finish on top. I was a gay-baiting friend who didn’t know what I was and I owed it to him. I don’t think it made me feel any better. I laid in his bed next to him and didn’t sleep much.[4]

I was fourteen when I said I was something bordering a girl. I was in my dad’s car, and I told him, and he took it in stride. But I didn’t, and I buried a lot of things for a lot of years. But you’ve heard all this before, haven’t you?[5]

I wake up and I have classes now, and I have work to do, and I exist in the world. In a café bathroom, someone’s painted the walls an inoffensive gray, and I pick at a scab on my hip. I toss out crusted blood, watch new blood well in the hole, and walk back to the lobby. I’ve been staring at blank white Word screens all day.

Sometimes when I’m upset I’m worse at seeing color. This summer feels still, and I miss movement; but that’s just because I don’t have a car, and you have to drive to see anything in Missouri. Empty sidewalks bridge highways that chopped neighborhoods into halves. The St. Louis Urbanist Coalition is holding a meeting in a few days, and I might go. They’ve been building public benches out of cinderblocks and wooden planks.

There are times when the storms pick up here, when the temperature drops ten or twenty degrees out of nowhere, and the wind rushes in, and the rain is so hard I mistake it for ice. A branch fell a few inches from my head while I was walking home today. I look up at the clouds—towering, mutating, casting every color of light—and I’m reminded of home.

Is it still normal to feel shame? How often did you feel shame? How much shame do you feel now? My dad doesn’t know my name. My mom changed hers and I don’t know what it is. Sometimes I wear boys’ clothes because they’re easier. My mom has cancer and I haven’t called her since March. My grandma hears nothing from me. My grandpa is dying and he hears nothing.

I’m young and close to home, so I’m slated to die, like the storm chasers before me. My high school can keep the plaques. If I’m thought of in the future, and you can’t shake how you used to see me, then I ask forgiveness for the faggot, and nothing more. If I don’t die in this heat, I’ll return to somewhere colder, and I’ll stay there until I tire of the cold.

[1] faggot

[2] I wanted to love like a girl, I wanted to love like how I imagined my mom could love. Like how I dimly remembered her love when I was three or four years old and we sat on my floor and she illustrated a little book about my fascination with the planets. She was twenty-two then.

[3] I wanted to look like the girls in my class, and I felt wrong all the time. I was on my knees in front of toilets and experimenting with kitchen knives and scissors and razor blades removed from their safeties. I cut myself between the ribs because that was where I felt it most, that was where I knew everything was meant to come out. I wanted to be unrecognizable.

[4] I tried a lot of things to feel normal. I wrapped my hand around his cock when he told me to and I was a gay-baiting friend who didn’t know what I was and I owed it to him. I don’t think it made me feel any better. I lay in his bed next to him and didn’t sleep much.

[5] But you’ve heard all this before, haven’t you?

Jasmine Wright is a student at Yale University.

ABOUT THE ART | Dämeritzsee by Audrey Coombe, 2023. Audrey Coombe is a student at Yale University.