The Way Things Collide by Summer Krafft
“ten years of things not crashing into other things without warning”
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I am four years old. It is 1998. I am a girl. Daddy is angry, somewhere, and he left me in the car, so I keep my lips shut tight. Best not to speak when Daddy is angry. Best not to moveblinkbreathe when Daddy is angry. Daddy’s anger comes from somewhere else, on the other side of oceans. Daddy didn’t have a daddy. Or a mommy, really. But I have an Oma, which means “grandma” in Dutch. My Oma and my Daddy are from Holland. Her name is Mary. Peter, son of Mary, still somehow motherless. Peter, Daddy to Summer Lynn. That’s what he calls me, even though Lynn is Mommy’s name and he hates Mommy. He said so. But he loves me. He says so.
Is this what love feels like?
Hands?
The President is in some kind of trouble for something he did with his hands to some girl. I see him on the TV. I don’t understand why Mommy said he is handsome.
Did he love her?
It’s hot. I don’t know where daddy is --probably somewhere working on his airplane. How long is he going to leave me in this car? My head is light. My thighs are sticking to the car seat. It is summer. My name is Summer. I didn’t choose my name. Mommy and Daddy chose it when they still thought they could love each other, and they chose it because it was supposed to be my middle name, but then they couldn’t agree on a first name, and they got tired of fighting, so my name is Summer and I live in California with my Mommy but I am here for the summer with Daddy doing all I can to keep quiet. He likes me quiet. He likes me small. When I stay quiet and small and pretty, he calls me a good girl.
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I am seven years old. It is 2001. Today, I wake up to my mom and grandma standing in the kitchen clutching their cups of coffee staring at smoke and fire on the TV screen. Somebody flew a plane into the Twin Towers. My father took me there this summer. My father lives in New York. He lives upstate, mostly, but he was supposed to be in the city today for business.
“Do you want to call your dad?” my mom asks. I bite the inside of my cheek and shake my head no. “Okay,” she says. My mom treats me like a grown-up. When she asks me a question, she actually wants to know the answer. She hugs me tight and kisses the top of my head.
My grandma drives me to school. Less than half the kids are in class. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Wharton talks about something called “terrorism” and tries not to cry. She says, “This is a very sad day for our country.” She offers a hug to any of the students who want one. I sit at my desk, hands folded, nails scratching at my cuticles, biting the inside of my cheek and maybe not even blinking.
Is he dead? Do I want him to be dead? Am I awful, evil girl for not calling to see if my father is alive?
When Mrs. Wharton comes over to my part of the room with her blonde bob and teacher dress to offer me a hug, I do not accept.
I call my father when I get home from school that day. By this time, it is 5:30 or so in New York. By this time, our whole nation is crying. By this time, I can’t tell whether or not I want him to answer the phone. When he answers, in his fathergrowl he asks, “Why didn’t you call me sooner?” I tell him I had to go to school. I tell him the part of the truth that might keep me safe. By this time, I have a railroad track wound on the inside of each of my cheeks that is oozing blood. I try to find enough breath to say “I’m sorry.” I do not cry all day.
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I am seventeen years old. It is the summer of 2011. We are about to celebrate ten years of things not crashing into other things without warning. By now, I am a singer. I am going to be singing and holding the flag at the football game on September 11th. The rest of the choir will be singing too, but I’ll be holding the flag because of how tall I am. That, and being a mezzo-soprano, I stand in the middle of the formation. I’m undecided about how much I like America –with things falling from the sky and nothing but death on the news- but I like knowing that he’s going to be watching me from the stands that night: Ted, the sillysweetwatchingmeboy. Ted, with the big brown curly hair, the small white patch on his light brown skin next to his left eye, and the oddly short fingers. He was the strange kind of lovely. He was the kind of lovely that had been my best friend for the two years prior. He was the kind of lovely who saw something lovely in me.
Ted and I were close. The kind of close that people say boy and girl can’t be and still be friends. It was summer. My name is Summer. He always called me by my full name, including the last name I got from my father. He was in LA studying his mother’s tongue at an honorary smart-kid-goes-to-college-early program, and I was under the almost-Canada sky of the Washington state border visiting my aunt and uncle. We had never been so far from each other. We had never gotten the chance to miss each other. We had never been apart long enough to see what thoughts would arise about one another just before we fell asleep. We fell asleep thinking about each other that summer. Me, dreaming about his short-fingered hands doing delicate dances against my bare, pearl skin. Him, dreaming of the graze of my berry lips dragged across certain skin of him. For the first time, I was dreaming of hands that weren’t my father’s, and it didn’t hurt to be a girl. Ted and I talked about all the things mouths could do. We talked about our bodies, seventeen as they could be, and what we could do with them.
When we came home, we had exactly three nights together. We were still kids refusing to admit that we were still kids, and did not realize how hopeful we’d been. We didn’t realize how foolish a thing hope could be. We kept it to hands on bodies and mouths on mouths for those three nights, but I could not stop the wave of my hips against his. We left each other breathless, and then we left each other. The night we ended, it was a crash in its own right, and I sang a song in a tear-strained voice in our memorium. He held me from behind, dropping tears of his own, and planted small kisses on my summerbareshoulders and the back of my neck. It was the first time either of us ever had to say goodbye.
It was the summer of 2011. We were about to celebrate ten years of things not crashing into other things without warning, but no one had thought to warn us of the way sometimes best friends who are a boy and a girl could collide.
When September 11th of that year came, I could almost not bear to mourn anything but the beautiful boy who’d touched me and left the ghost of his fingertips behind in my dreams. I was amazed that a nation could hurt just like a girl. I stood on that field and held that flag feeling like a traitor to everything I’d dreamt of that summer, but I sang. Does a song ever do anything to heal a country or the lovewound of a girl? What is it that I’m singing for? I don’t remember if he was in the stands. I didn’t let myself look. I just shut out the thought of our teenage-almosts and might-have-been-somethings. I just shut out the thought of childhood and father. I just shut out the thought of the ways I had known things to collide right before they explode.
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Summer Krafft is a writer, performer, student, event coordinator, and teaching artist based in California’s Central Valley. She is also playwright of an One-Act entitled "Sanity Dance," which has been produced at two local theatres, one of which she is currently co-writing an upcoming conceptual project with. Her work tends to explore themes of love, rage, forgiveness, and the body.