there were always times i thought about writing more spoken word, open words, for an open stage; just remembering the weight of a microphone in my hands and the weakness in my kneecaps while i stood in front of an audience and spoke fiction masked by facts but the truth of the matter has been clear for ten years, that my keyboard spelled out lies whenever inspiration ran dry- propelled by an uneasy fear of loss, translated with no rhyme or cadence––and now i owe apologies to the boys i've loved for having wasted their years and mine with these long-term leases renewed by aimless disregard for time because it seemed easier to settle and i was always committed to the grind, to the vague satisfaction of what was functionally good or indifferently long and maybe all the writers through all of history got their stories all wrong; what if romance was a mirage (just a synonym for dysfunction) and what if love was designed to meet loneliness at each junction and what if the best of relationships functioned like reliable employment, so i showed up every day and waited for the check but it never came and they always left and the language of my cover letter became increasingly bereft and there were nights i sat across from strangers exchanging rote pleasantries like alms but then i'd drive home right after, add 10 more milligrams to my palms and now i've been thinking but it hurts me thinking that those nights that i spent drinking, that they never got us anywhere with all those wasted times you drove me home and all that wasted time i told you no but now we are finally here and it is always getting clearer that there was no one else before you and there will be no one after because i've been in dress rehearsals for a decade with understudy actors and i think we're getting deep now, shit i'm talking might be too true but i know that i have been waiting my whole life for you––for this fire in my chest and the certainty in my step and the sincerity of your text and the milestones we have left and i know that i would do it all again just to know i got it right, that i would reread every chapter because you make me want to write.
i dreamt about you nearly every night this week
slow burns of lit cigarettes building into forest fires; i feel like i was put on this earth to write about your love.
and i knew that my last lines were gone
it is not the discussion- not the overly gentle tone or the bracing hesitancy, the carefully cultivated bedside manner balancing on a tightrope between no-nonsense diagnosis and the trepiditious weight of bad news breaking- but the scenery that shifts my gut and sends a dull weight plummeting to my feet. because uncertain numbers and unclear images wouldn't necessitate a field trip into his office space, to these soft chairs and hard shelves and sunlight streaming in through floor-to-ceiling windows with a tollway traffic jam on display. it is the space in between the words, the omnipresent ghost of the unspoken noun cancer following closely behind the clinical terminology that he picks and weaves his way through like checkpoints that must be crossed to finish out this conversation- non-hodgkins lymphoma, b cell count, primary extranodal, high ldh, aggressive. he sandwiches that last word in between platitudes like some options and still very treatable but it sticks out like a red flag and carves me out into a hollow shell of disbelief. and so i sit very still and wait for the part where the alarm clock jolts me out of this falling arc or the fourth wall is broken and it turns out to be fiction all along but the sunlight is slanting across his desk in a slow and steady progression that tells me this is my life and my narrative and the inkwell is abruptly running dry. my mind shifts bizarrely, unbidden, to the perspective of patients and victims and casualties of war who must always think immediately prior to the killing blow- this can't be happening to me, i am the protagonist! and it occurs to me that the deus ex machina is not coming for me, no bag of chemo cocktails or radiation will exonerate me from this plot device because unbeknownst to me this was always intended to be a story about disease and the chest pains and cold sweats and persistent coughs were just built to spill into the denouement.
and then someone says something about the stages of grief mirrored in the acceptance of disease and it seems that i have bypassed every emotional high and low in the space of seconds to flatline at zero. there is no more left to write and my story is ready to be shelved in dusty, forgotten stacks to be referenced on rare occasion for research about prognosis.
file under: terminally ill or terminally numb.
memory #7
and i think- just for a split second- that i would wait for him in every airport for every year just to see him smiling at me from the other side of the glass. he is so beautiful to me in this heartbeat's space of time- this tiny pause between valves closing and breath catching, creating a freeze frame of suspended hope. and i forget for a moment that i'm nervous and uncomfortable in these stupid plastic yellow flats, ludicrous and slippery on frozen winter sidewalks. i forget that i am always so awkward and graceless and second-guessing every movement. all i know in this moment is this unexpected capture, this instance my brain casts memories in amber glass, frozen forever in warm light. and this feeling- this feeling i have always lived with- that i will carry this snapshot in time for the rest of my life.
memory #9
neon green light suffusing tables in a sickly glow, sparsely attended bar, cowardly cup of malibu & pineapple condensing in my sweaty left hand, my right one preoccupied with two part time jobs––texting barely restrained bitterness / wiping away the hot surge of unwanted, unwarranted tears (unwarranted in its predictability, in its contextual familiarity that i had set myself up for the fall in the final act of this lousy play in this empty theater just me alone on stage with a monologue read solely to my dog and a bottle of hydrocodone prescribed solely for my disappointment to be summarized in the weird and uncomfortable moment my voice broke across a tinny skype call to a stranger 2500 miles away as i said i'm not okay, i'm not eating at all) so then on that night awash in the green light my heart collapsed in a palpable, visceral way while he told me between measured responses in cold gray bubbles that another girl was spending the night and then i felt the weight in my chest finally giving away and collapsing hard through the stopgap measure of nightmares and netflix, dragged down with interminable velocity and the gravity of realization––the sickening epiphany that the worst brand of heartbreak is a self-inflicted one, that i was never swimming closer to shore but treading water while the landscape drifted farther away, that i was out there on this ledge by myself the entire time, nursing a small fire i kept burning in the back of my chest cavity (a small and shuttered space leased month-to-month) for him in stubborn defiance of meteorology.
but then you held my hand quietly and drove me home, and for the first time in our friendship there were finally no jokes or quips to exchange. and this is why i clutch on to a memory that once burned with humiliation. because the narrative shifted that night, the photo reframed itself, the gray bubble reassembled itself to that message you sent that i still read and reread so many months later- the only love letter i have ever received. this memory is like your apartment in las colinas suffering from an architectural flaw that cracks the front door open when the bathroom door slams shut- in the same night i finally nailed a coffin closed, a warm light turned on somewhere in the distance. i followed it to you and i am finally home.
drunk and i am seeing stars
you know what i'm talking about. you know this feeling too.
it's that geometric space your neck and shoulder form, how my face fits there like an elementary school puzzle. there is no guesswork, there is no discomfort, there is only an anatomical magnetism that seven years' pursuit of bioscience still cannot explain. i am not attractive, but i feel beautiful in that space. i am not fragile, but i feel delicate against you. i have never been quite feminine, but i feel like the first woman in the world when i feel you breathe beside me. and i am not carved from your ribcage- i start where your clavicle ends, and my fingers find their homes between yours. we lay there in the dark, listening to bob dylan on your record player. hey mr. tambourine man, play a song for me. i'm not sleepy and there's no place i'm going to. i am here and i am safe and i am at home in your heart.
you know what i'm talking about. you lie there at night with the one that you love and you are happy in a way that you cannot define. you are unsinkable in their arms. it is not vocal, it is not sexual, and there are no doubts to be had. it is the space where you are welcome, the body heat that keeps you warm, the forms you take as if your bodies were born with muscle memory for each other.
this is how i know i am meant for no one else but you.
it's to dying in another's arms and why i had to try it
tempest
tem·pest
/ˈtempəst/
noun
later, much later, i will eulogize you faithlessly.
i will tell everyone you were a mercurial force of nature sweeping into my life with the sheer, violent force of waves crashing recklessly against weathered stone. i will paint those years with wide, vivid brushstrokes of color, overlapping the boundaries of reality as carelessly as you slammed doors and scattered cigarette ash. i will get drunk in dive bars and trace your name in watery rings, slur my words and my memories in my retelling of our romance. i will rewrite the late nights and sunday mornings in iambic pentameter, glorifying the way your body moved against me, the color of your hair in sunlight that bled through broken blinds, the thrill of your uninhibited laugh reverberating in my ears. that you were a woman with a passport inked as heavily as your arms, a wild and unbreakable spirit fired by jet fuel, destined to roam through uncharted territory. that the ligature of my mortgage statements and the 90 degree angles of my ties created spaces that trapped you, intersecting lines of banalities like bars on a cage that kept you pacing like a restless tiger. i will tell your parents that your strengths were my weaknesses, i will tell your friends that you were designed for adventure, i will tell myself (when i find a pillowcase that still smells like your perfume, when i crumple up mail catalogs still faithfully addressed to you) that you would not be contained, could not be contained- because the only way to handle it was to romanticize it.
because the truth of it wasn't poetic panacea or a bittersweet revelation, because nobody wanted to read a story about a selfish, irresponsible protagonist. and the facts of it laid bare against paper would've read dry and bitter, encyclopedic recitations about a bored and vapid woman who chased adrenaline and refused accountability, teenage vices stoking a junkie's mind. and the years we spent together were only a poorly calculated mistake, some unfactored algebra carrying you over the threshold and propelled by inertia, the mundane day-to-day like your habitual, jittery chainsmoking- forgetting your keys, forgetting your phone, forgetting to leave. and it was always more fog than storm, your temper waxing and waning to leave an exhausted, blurry cast to the canvas. you were blues, grays, yellows in a small and mean watercolor better left in storage than framed.
but later, much later, i will stand beside your casket and invent a narrative better suited for your long hair and tall tales, i will stand at the crossroads of fact and fiction and choose the path of least resistance- that same path i chose ten years ago when i first met you at a house party and you purred take me home with you in my ear. i took you home, and you took me down, but i have one last kindness left in me to rewrite both of our mistakes- the final act of the final play.
i eulogize you as a tempest.
and the train ain't even left the station
timing
tim·ing
/ˈtīmiNG/
noun
what a joke, that even the dictionary definition of this word indicates choice, judgment, control. that the meaning of the thing has been corrupted to helplessness, a vague shrug with directionless blame- to exculpate ourselves from the weight of incompatible decisions.
it’s not you, it’s the timing you said to me once, running your fingers through your hair distractedly, halfway checked out of the conversation even as you propelled it forward. as if you were a bus stop slightly behind schedule, or i showed up a little too early for a meeting, as if our lives were two calendars 10 minutes or 10 years out of sync with one another. maybe sometime in the future.
but we both knew it was never just a trick of the hourglass, an uncontrolled lag between clocks. timing was a metaphor for the things that could not be said, would never be said-
i do not love you.
you do not love me.
death is only a door
normalize
nor·mal·ize
ˈ/nôrməˌlīz/
verb
the normal heart is a machine in flux, readjusting and recalibrating in feedback loops to level its expectations. the weather changes. her phone number changes. your pulse changes. the heart remains in homeostasis through tiny mechanical clicks that shift you into place, one beat at a time, so inconspicuous and well-oiled that you forget to micromanage the oscillation.
but i have never had a normal heart.
it will only ever multiply by one to bring me back to you.
12:03
you wake up (not to your usual alarm not that collapsible travel clock with the peeling backlight button and the tinny morning wailing shattering the icy stillness of winter mornings) but an unfamiliar beep-beep-beep that faintly reminds you of a tv show you used to watch together but you don't know why it's so hard to open your eyes or why every muscle fiber in your face must rally and strain to do this but they are opening now with agonizing slowness to a light so white it blinds you and then above you there is a face and you think that it might be him hovering in to kiss you through those sunday afternoons you slept in late but the light is rearranging itself into crystalline points and his face is falling into anxious lines that belong to a stranger this man above you wearing a surgical mask and his gloved hands are cold probes against your skin and you try to find some words to form but there is a tube in your mouth and it stifles every question and somewhere distant a woman’s nasal voice complains oh it’s raining i better check my car windows and then a memory collides into you with astonishing speed a nightmare of wet roads brake lights his sharp intake of breath a stranger’s screams in your throat but the beep-beep-beep of your alarm is getting faster now and the man above you shouts she’s going tachy as sleep fills the corners of your vision and drags you back into the dark
i keep dancing on my own
he tells me i have always loved you and i don't know how to respond but the truth of it is so simple, so effortlessly lined up against the edge of my teeth, an inescapable fact breaking through the hulls of reality-
i have only ever loved control.
pass me that lovely little gun
disprove
dis·prove
disˈpro͞ov/
verb
i'm calling it, you said on our first date. we were each 4 cocktails deep and wading through a mediocre chocolate lava cake. you're gonna end up breaking my heart.
it is a small, superficial measure of comfort to know that you finally got something wrong.
you won't ever get too far from me
ardor
ar·dor
ˈärdər/
noun
her fingers reach and grasp for me (but no, not for my hands, never for my hands again); she grips my hair and pulls hard, drawing sharp and shallow breaths, riding me with an urgency that weakens my knees. she is drunk and i am not drunk enough. this night washed through with city lights, wistful jokes, soggy napkins weakening beneath cold glasses, a four-hour lifetime in this strange space between familiarity and trepidation as our shoulders inch closer by millimeters and our knees bump together shyly and i am close enough to smell the perfume you once knocked over into the laundry hamper, infiltrating my boxers and bath towels for weeks. and it's that scent that takes me back now with your mouth searing my skin and your glorious hair spilling across my chest and this is not the dizzy, clumsy dance we initiated the first night we met; it is eight years later and we have never forgotten the choreography. we perfect it now, as if every tryst before was only a moment in the dress rehearsal but this is the real deal, this is the primetime debut, and we are flawless actors performing for a solipsistic audience––lust on stage, desire made solid, the innate muscle memory of sex between two lovers irrevocably etched into anatomy. and so you bite down on my shoulder and i plant a trail of bruises across your throat, and our pulses drum furiously in perfect timing but then you whisper––i think i still love you
and then my heart fails completely, punctured by this fatal misstep, this unplanned improvisation. you told me after your sister's dinner party, that december evening we spent arguing bleakly in a snowdrift, can you stop being so fucking analytical. but i couldn't stop then and i can't stop now and i am parsing your words even as the feeling of your hot skin against mine threatens to drive out all out other thoughts. and i don't know if it is the i think or the still that burns raw against an open wound but i know with the certainty of death and taxes that i have never stopped loving you––
or at the very least, loving the idea of you.
it's always you in my big dreams
three deaths.
1. the ink dries on our signatures hastily scribbled on this notice to vacate, this lease transfer agreement, the final page of our divorce settlement; black ink sprawling spidery-legged and indelible, sketching out the framework of loss. irreconciliable proof that death is paperwork and curt decisions. your hollow voice and my hollow heart empty out our home, strings of memorabilia that threaten waves of nausea and i pack it up, i pack it all, i keep every photo and every ticket and every scrap of paper your handwriting ever graced and i think that i would die without them but the first death is always like this, it is always a trick of the light, the words that can't be unsaid, the tears that can't be undone, the space of a few missing heartbeats that terminate us––and the u-haul pulls away in a gaudy funeral procession and we hug for the last time but it is a meager consolation for a loss that swallows me whole.
2. the body in love dies next, a slow and undetectable attrition. my skin renews and the imprint of your fingers across my hips erodes to nothing; the cellular regeneration makes me new; another unmarked, uncharted territory washed free of your conquering trails. the history of your mouth rewrites itself with new speech, new drinks, new women with foreign tongues vandalizing a place i once called home. my hands forget how to feel for fevers, how to stroke your hair; my fingers forget how to interlock with yours like puzzle pieces finally reunited after years of being lost between the couch cushions. we lose muscle memory from nights of sleeping implicitly in practiced art forms so your arms forget how to reach across to me and my face forgets how to find your chest and so my bed is a blank canvas stretching on for miles while my body remakes itself in new and lonely forms on the side that was never even mine––the blue period of my love.
3. one day i pause to say your name, and it feels like a stranger in my vocabulary, a half-forgotten linguistic crutch. one day you see a photo of me but my face is washed in wide, monochromatic strokes of memories. and this death is the slowest, the hardest to bear, the final parting at a train station filled with estranged lovers who revisit one another in dreams, in wistful conversations, in the painful significance of missed anniversaries. and we have long since lost the details and here we will finally lose the photograph, leaving nothing but an empty frame, a placeholder for years of our youth, a generic exhibit or tombstone template––
- loss of love, nothing more to see here.
the unbearable lightness
his fingers trace the curves of my ribs, and he tells me that i am beautiful.
and then i tell myself, i will not eat today.
there is a perverse pleasure in these moments when i catch my body forming anatomical topography where it used to be an unbroken landscape swollen with only soft hills and low rises. a deep valley here, where my waist hollows out beneath a crest of costal cartilage; a sharp mountain range here, where my hips thrust skyward in bony peaks. the secret caves surrounding my clavicle; the visible landmarks of my spine. the cartography of my body carved out of oxygen, water, black coffee, sugarfree gum.
and although he maps me with his hands, lifting me with extraordinary ease, i am still waiting to feel lighter. light enough for my bones to hollow out,
hollow enough to finally take flight.
iron council
bastard, cutter thought, tearing up, trying to speak. bastard to say that to me. you know what you are to me. bastard. he felt his chest hollow, felt as if he were falling inside, as if his very fucking innards were straining for judah. “love you, judah,” he said. he looked away. “love you. do what i can.” i love you so much judah. i’d die for you. he wept without sob or sound, furious at it, trying to wipe it away.
never letting go
i’ve hurt you in a way that i can’t fully comprehend, but i am always just bringing a knife to a gun fight.
i wouldn't change this if i could
six years from now, it will still hurt.
you will grow older, you will grow stronger. you will stop writing unsent letters in your outlook drafts, in your daily planner, on the backs of grocery receipts, across the pages of books he used to read. you will have sex with strangers, friends, lovers. you will remember some of them, and call the rest by the wrong names. you will vacation in tokyo and go skydiving in kansas and grow your bangs out and smile more easily. you will feel lighter and breathe deeper and your hands will grip the steering wheel without drawing your knuckles white against bone. you will finally change your last name back, standing in long lines at the dps watching excited teenagers pretend to look jaded as they pose for their driver's license photos. you will stop watching the calendar for dates that used to matter, seasons he used to own, memories that used to burn deep. you will stop finding shirts in the back of the closet that still smell like him––and the ones that do you will fold up and donate. you will put those old playlists back on and learn how to dance to them without faltering, and spend your evenings drinking cheap wine and slowly falling in love with your life.
but six years from now, it will still hurt.
i want to go home
sheila eats a packet of peanuts m&ms at work, counting them slowly into her palms like jewel-bright tablets of prescription medication.
she stops after six, ruefully wrapping the crinkly yellow bag closed with the origami dexterity of a practiced dieter. she tells me she wants to lose fifteen pounds and i nod and smile and point at my headset to indicate i am on a call, but the hold music has been playing for half an hour and its tinny vibrato is still preferable to sheila's liturgy about her thighs. and i think she might have once been pretty or could still be pretty, but she sits in that ergonomic office chair with the posture of the perpetually defeated, picking her nails nervously and telling dana about another blind date that never called back. dana is 54 years old and her husband died two years ago of a heart attack during a secret trip with their daughter's french teacher, but she encourages sheila with parables about true love with this weird unhinged smile plastered across her face and i think her mind must be touching the void.
sheila recounts body language and unspoken signals, fiddling with the elastic waistband of her straining pencil skirt, and the dark red threads are worn shiny by the stress of being forced into an unintended shape. dana, greying and sagging gracelessly around her lacquered salmon lipstick, tells sheila vaguely that it's almost lunchtime and thank god it's friday and the two of them swap sad stories about weekend plans that i know will easily become arbor mist and seinfeld reruns. sheila unwraps a pale turkey sandwich so cold and insubstantial that it doesn't smell like anything, and i watch her eyes dart toward the m&ms bag winking merrily at the corner of her desk.
and i think i will go home today and this might finally be the day i break up with ethan. i think i could pack up his stray socks and boxers and put them in that reusable grocery bag and take off this engagement ring that doesn't fit and was never sized. and i will tell him that i am sick of his lies and my bruises. and i will finally use my pto and take a vacation by myself, get away from these fluorescent lights and conversations about celebrity bikini bodies. and i will be happy alone, without a boyfriend for the first time in ten years.
and then sheila finally dives back into the m&m's, ripping the bag apart with a frenzied urgency as she laughs and tells no one in particular, guess my diet starts tomorrow. and dana reassures her that chocolate is good for the soul. and ethan texts me again to ask me when i am coming home. and i type back soon with stiff, hesitant fingers.
and i think that i will wait until tomorrow.
don't give yourself away
one day you will come home and tell me you have met someone else––a new hire in your office, an old college classmate at the bar, a friend of a friend at a house party. one day, i will lean hard against our balcony and think about the weight of gravity. one day, we will have the difficult conversation and your hands will abandon my own to smooth the creases in your jeans nervously, over and over again. one day we will turn in this notice to vacate and pack our things and try not to notice that your socks cling static to my forgotten party dresses and that my heart clings desperate to your forgotten love letters. one day we will argue about who this saucepan belonged to originally and our anger will burst and bloom into bitter poison between our teeth. one day you will move out and she will wait for you beside the u-haul, wearing tight jeans and a triumphant smile. one day i will find synonyms for "over" in three languages and twelve steps of acceptance. one day you will text me awkwardly and tell me you will always care.
one day i will sit down at this keyboard and finally exorcise your name from my mouth.
one day i will sell the story of our nights spent sweating, my incisors at your neck.
one day i will replace you with paper and ink.