Read Poem: Louise in Paris in the World of the Undead, by Tesa Flores

When your girlhood leaves you, you are, kind of, still a girl.

When grandma speaks of her regrets it’s almost as if she’s right there. Like it’s almost possible to bring her twin back from the dead, away from the bottle 50 or more years ago, rearrange the puzzle pieces so that she makes it to Europe.

“Louise never got to go to Europe” she’ll say slowly every few days, almost unbelieving. Almost as if it’s something on her to-do list, she has got to get someone to show her how to get on the internet, book a ticket, and make sure Louise goes to Paris.

Today AI can make us a photo of our dear Louise smiling in front of the Eiffel tower as it sparkles. But the someday twinkle in the eye is gone. Someday came and left without her. I get older and inherit all this melancholy, it spirals around my ribcage and turns my bones bruise purple. I look in the mirror, wondering how they got so lonely. What is there to be done about the bed that was made?

The second before this one is so close we can almost grab behind us and snatch it, like the subway door.

It was just here, if you can just run fast enough to catch it before it goes to the next stop. I was buzzing with my boyfriend, the New Years in which it turned into 2023, clock strikes midnight.

I grabbed balloons from the moodily lit restaurant and bobbed with them all the way home. I was lighter then I think, buoyant with him by my side taking a selfie with an inflatable Christmas minion.

We sat next to strangers who were quiet beside us while we chatted. They weren’t saying anything but we strung words together like popcorn garlands. So easy to spear the next sentence with our needle, enough popcorn for everyone.

And when my next birthday comes in 2024 I will still be mulling over those $15 weeks when I worked at the grocery store in 2020 when it was death, death, death and office politics. The past is playing peekaboo with us, ducking behind exquisitely manicured hedges in Los Angeles and the Hamptons, places I’ve been but never behind the gates.

The past is coy, existential hide and seek.

And the regrets of my elders soak into my bloodstream like Aunt Louise’s lidocaine patches those last years. Every day a needle slits through fabric, another stitch nailed in, stitching you into your bed.