She wanted to buy the fridge freshmen year, just in case we ended up hating each other. She didn’t want us to have to bicker about who got to keep it. We laughed about that in the first dizzy April, then again in the fleeing November sleet – we laughed about it as we barreled toward one another at the airport, against each other’s lips, we were always laughing, we laughed at everything but most of all at her foolish attempt at safety before she knew me and realized we would share a fridge forever. We laughed about it during the months we spent apart, me getting high in the Netherlands and her working at Jersey Mikes, we laughed about it in the greedy mountain river, swimming naked and freezing and unashamed, and we laughed about it when she moved in with me, a shitty one bedroom apartment in Colorado, where she stayed for three days and kissed me blind and said she liked men, not women, and boarded a plane the next morning, and I was laughing as I carried her suitcase down the stairs, laughing as I crammed her clothes in a box, laughing as I stood barefoot in the dorm again and saw the same fridge pushed against the wall, kept there just in case.
Kelsey Day is a poet and novelist from southern Appalachia. Her work is urgent, timely, and relentlessly vulnerable, and has been published in literary journals such as Reservoir Road Literary Review, Storm Cellar Literary Magazine, Brave Voices Magazine, and Our Shared Memory Collective. She is a recipient of the University of Chicago’s Young Memory Fellowship and is an honors student at Emerson College. She works with women from across the globe with the International Women’s Writing Guild, is a staff writer for Two Story Melody, and serves as the Head Poetry Editor for the Emerson Review.