My bunk bed is a gallery of girls of I have been.

a testament to the person I haven’t quite yet become.

There’s still a wad of gum lodged in one of the shoulders of the bunk bed’s steel frame from when I used to collect gum balls in a bag that I hid beneath my pillow. She didn’t have the ability to lie– only to serve as the sage to her brother.

Billy and her sat on the floor and laid out to the gumballs and she pointed to the blue one. Said that it stopped time. Pointed to the green one. Said it made you invisible. Pointed to the white one. Said it made you breath fire. Billy eat the gummy worms.

One the outside edge of the bunk bed there are rows of stick hearts from unfinished fifth-grade Valentines. Everyone got Valentines and no one knew what they meant.

She had short hair. She was annoyed most times about how her stomach folded over the waist band of her jeans. She didn’t like the lines that bra straps made beneath her shirts. She had short hair. She liked orchids. In blue pen she wrote her crush’s name on her knee cap after she finished his Valentine.

Strings tied to the beams are relics of afternoons during August after sixth grade when the bunk bed became a caravan without a destination– selling dragon eggs and crepes.

She made a fire from a nightlight. Traced shadow puppets on the make-shift walls of blankets that made the bottom bunk into a cloth room. Told Billy to move over. Woke him up when she got the feeling she was all alone. She could only hear her breath and the fan. She was old enough to know that it was silly to make a caravan out of blankets but young enough to let herself pretend for fading instances.

Yesterday they slept on the floor of the gallery and still thought of gumballs and crushes and caravans. Fell asleep like an art critique in the mattress-valley their body had deepened for almost a decade.