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Cells
By
Matthew Brian Cohen, Mar 21, 2008
It has been seven years since I met you and I am made of entirely new
cells. This is the science I learned from Snapple caps—that every seven
years, all the cells in your body change. I couldn’t tell you if it was
true or not, if I was really a biologically new person, but when we were
driving home in your car and your voice played my favorite song louder
like a growling pit of fire, it felt like dying, microscopically, and
being renewed. If it was true, it was my cellular baptismal—Page France
was crackling out from the stereo, lit by snares and dusty bass, your
hands held loose around the wheel as you sang along to all the words
transparent, fanning soft and fuzzy melody to rise like warm dough and
your mouth was sparked so sweetly wide and bursting cool, white air out
into bloom.
If the Snapple caps were true, it was my first breath in this body. All
else from me had been shed to exile—the smoke from the cigarettes I
tried when I was drunk and lonely, the layer of sweat caked on my hands
since puberty, the fibers from sweaters too tight in the shoulders, the
flakes of burnt skin from summers when I was weightless, when I could
hold my head underwater for so long and my mother swore she was
watching, and all the ghostly callouses from summers spent lazing about
my old town, nowhere to go except for a bar or for coffee, maybe the
high school to reminisce—everything had become uncaged from me. You are
my first sense, my first smell, my first touch and sound and it is
learning me to be lucid, learning how to make my lungs unfold and
breathe immaculate, learning how to stretch into new skin, how to wipe
my palms clean to the music and air and rhythm of your body, just as new
as mine—burning, stripped and purgatoryed, starving for a song to stop
the choking, our voices clutched in our chests as we listen deep and
breathe close and feel like starting over.
If the Snapple caps could be trusted. If they couldn’t, it would take a
lot more than a song and some heavy breathing to change things, or maybe
it would just need a couple more years.
Matthew Brian Cohen lives and writes out of New Jersey. He writes music reviews for
Adequacy and can be contacted via
email with any questions, criticisms, or
praise.
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