I always wanted to be like him. I wanted to grow up in a different way than I knew I would. For a few years, we were able to celebrate our similarities.
We stacked wood, giving me splinters in my fingers and forearms. We hunted for worms in the early morning dew, mud caked on my knees and fingernails. We caught fish and ate muffins after, putting scales and algae on my tongue.
We rode the four-wheeler down the road and into the swamp, swallowing from our noses and spitting to the side. Sometimes, I'd hit his glasses and he'd exaggerate his disgusted face, taking my little sleeve to wipe them off. We drank black coffee to put hair on our chests, and built shelters from fallen branches "for the bunnies and squirrels, I'm sure they'll love it," he told me. "A little house in the woods."
It broke. I turned sixteen and he didn't give me challenges the same way anymore. He gave me a ring, stuck in archaic religious teachings of a father owning his daughter until someone else came along. He didn't have the language for a different kind of promise. So I wore it, speechless, feeling like a failure to my tomboy self and the performance of womanhood just beginning.
We built a bridge, after some years. We found different versions of the roles that used to be so comfortable. We set out to the woods together, building fires and skipping stones. And when I sling into my hammock across the clearing from his, I twist my ring, crying over the lost years, with gratitude they are over.
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