Stretchmarks
By Sam Donndelinger
- How drunk are you?” I laughed into the night.
Spinning down the hill in the dark, riding on his handlebars, the brownstones lining the sidewalks, it was easy to pretend I lived in the historic part of Brooklyn. The windows were washed clean and they flashed by with silhouettes of couples standing, drawing curtains, and pouring wine.
“I’m completely sober!” Leon shouted.
We drank a bottle of gin and biked to the Hudson. At first, I held my skirt taut so the wind wouldn’t bother it, but then I let it blow across my knees and my freezing thighs. When we parked, he danced in the circle of a streetlight, humming a Beatles song, and I lay on the bench and crossed my ankles and acted like I was looking at the stars when really, I was looking at him.
- Picture him standing, with his floppy brown hair curled around his cheekbones. He was dressed in stripes from head to toe, but they went in all different directions so even though he was still, his figure warped in the kitchen light.
It carved hollows in his face and made him look more tired than he was. I like watching the way he looked at his roommate when he spoke. Leaned back, his hands on the counter, tracing his foot on the grout between the tiles.
- I bent one knee, naked on his bedsheets, and laced my fingers behind my head.
“Wow,” he breathed. Tracking his finger across my thigh, then my knee, then my calf, he said “Look at the little marks on your leg.”
He pointed to the purple squiggles. When veins are weak or damaged, when your blood pressure is too low, the walls can cause blood to pool and flow backward. It doesn’t hurt. You don’t even notice that it’s slipping, dripping the wrong way, but it causes scarring.
“It’s a broken vein,” I said. He kissed it softly.
- Leon’s mom let me borrow her bike that winter. It had a metal basket on the front and a bell that swung off the handlebars. Leon liked the bell because he knew how far behind I was lagging when we biked to class. He could hear me coming.
If I strayed for too long, or if I got a little lost, he would wait for me. Sometimes he would ride circles through the streets, arms outstretched like he was hugging the sky, waiting for me.
- It’s not like driving a car, when the elevation barely registers. No. Every dip and bump, every sharp turn, every remark of the road travels up through the wheels to your arms and spine and forces you to pay attention. Streets you’ve walked down a million times, the landmarks you knew, they look different at this speed.
Falling in love is not as simple as a straight plummet. Every movement feels like a new scab is being peeled back and picked over. Scars I didn’t know I had are suddenly highlighted in fluorescence and the jagged edges of magnifying glasses.
- We biked in the rain. I couldn’t see where I was going but I think I craved it that way. When I crashed, I saw the curb but —
“I thought I could make it,” I told him. The rain washed the blood down my knees, down the street drain.
I hit the curb hard, seven inches high at full speed, and the bike stopped in place. I lurched over the handlebars so hard the air flattened from my chest. I landed on my face, laughing enough that people thought I hit my head. I couldn’t see for a few hours, little spots floating around my peripheral.
“I thought –” He pulled my hood up. He tucked a piece of wet hair behind my ear and I didn’t stop him.
- “I love this mark,” he told me. I stripped off my rain-soaked blouse. “What is it called?”
The lines that caress my breasts, fanning out from the nipple, little cracks, little shapes. He brushed them like a pencil on a damp page, afraid he would erase them.
I thought stretch marks faded eventually, but they form when the skin is stretched beyond its limit, causing the fibers to rupture like a scar. They are scars.
- His cat likes to bring dead birds into his living room. Leon was staring at the base of his Christmas tree, trying to puzzle if the little mass was a dead bird or a fallen ornament.
I had the urge to take him in my hands and feel the blood and the warmth beneath his skin.
“I forget sometimes I’m allowed to kiss you,” I said.
He poked the bird with his foot. “You can always kiss me,” he said.
“I know,” I said, impatient. “I just forget. I forget sometimes.”
- Leon brought me tea this morning. It was a specific kind of delicate. Not like leaves breaking on the sidewalk, but the rough edges of a used instruction manual, crumpled slightly but aware of its shape. He placed his cold hands on my back as I vomited, as I curled up on the bathroom floor. The concussion from the bike crash pounded in my ears.
“I don’t feel well,” I said.
He wrapped his arms around me like he also lived there, like he owned a part of my body, but not in the way I’ve protested in the streets, no, in a way he has earned.
He took me to the ER. They changed their entrance, and we couldn’t find the door. I was wearing his sweatpants and his shoes. It was hard to see clearly. The corners of my vision tunneled, and I slid my back against the brick and the old patient entrance sign and crouched on the sidewalk.
He put a hand on my shoulder. “You are so strong,” he whispered. He lifted me by the waist, and we rounded the corner where the bikes were parked and the doors were automatic and the nurse said, “I’ll take it from here.”
- I have my own bike now. It’s too small, so I stretch forward to reach the handlebars. Sometimes, they wiggle in the wind when I’m flying down the bridges and the side streets of Brooklyn. The brakes are fragile, so I edge my foot against the ground to stop instead.
Cruising down the long hill on Park Slope and almost hurtling into traffic on 5th Ave, pressing back with one foot, then both feet, then leaning back so far, I might tip over, to stop, to try and stop, I’m not so afraid.
The sole of my shoe is worn down. I’m friends with the cobbler down the street but don’t want to tell him what happened. Not until I get the brakes fixed. One of these days, I’ll get the brakes fixed, but for now, I use my foot. I don’t really feel the need to stop.