I'll be putting on eyeliner. Memory of a childhood friend's home. They were the only neighbors who I came close to envying. Square trampoline, river nearby, long driveway. That was until they allowed the oil miners to corrupt their scenery with blinking lights and dirty black tanks. Blackheads, a friend called them. Popping up all over the place. Immediately I construct the home in my brain. Can I remember each door? I didn't spend that much time there. A best friend with blonde hair who always had skinnier thighs. It didn't prevent her from taking pieces of string to measure at the largest point. There was a day when hers surpassed mine, after I had moved away. God, Joni, yours are the smallest here. Best friends say the meanest words. We used to have a yearly ritual, called Pioneer Days. We relished in our colonized fantasies of drawing water and wearing dresses, camping out in a decomposing school that let the rain disrupt our sleep at night.


"What does it feel like," a girl at work asked me, "to be grown up?"