how to eat your own flesh

i keep waiting to feel it, but it never comes.

i keep waiting for it to hurt, but it never does.

you pack up your things in makeshift boxes, jumbled hurriedly in haphazard piles. she's waiting by the door, keys in hand.

you ask me if this is mine, or if that is yours, and how would i like to split those. i respond like an automaton, hollow and hardwired for monosyllable.

and i think about the day you moved in, the day we drank cheap boxed wine and started painting the walls lime-green. and we gave up, laughing, so you played grand theft auto while i slept in your lap. it was 20 degrees outside, but we stayed so warm. we ordered thai food and i wore that blue dress, but the paint was still drying when you pushed me up against the wall and slid your hands up my legs. and that dress was ruined but we were still drunk and and everything was okay. that night, we slept on the living room floor and you whispered i'm gonna love you until the day i die.

you are dead now, and so am i.  she waits for you, red lipstick and tight jeans.  and i wonder with no real curiosity if you will love her too. if you will make her a home in your arms, if you will put a ring on her finger. she steals guilty glances at me while you pack the last box of clothes. she says i'm sorry and i know that she isn't but none of it matters and i barely hear the sound of your keys dropping against the kitchen table for the very last time.

years ago i would have wrecked these walls with blood spray and holes in the shape of my fists.  years ago i would have lined up ten shot farewells to chase down the memory of you.  that bitter fucking pill.

but now it is november, and texas has never been quite this cold.  i'm alone in the living room, staring at that half-painted wall.  and i am waiting for the wound that isn't there, the heartbreak that never comes.

untouchable, unbruised.

i wouldn't change this if i could.

i wish i was a little more delicate

dreaming those nightmares again.  of being pressed against him, our fingers intertwined, while he says the words that puncture wounds in my vena cava.  and then i'm mimi from my previous life- bewildered, hurt, wanting.

but now i wake up without cold sweats, without the fear of loss.  i just wake up alone and think about getaways.  think about traveling somewhere- anywhere- just a plane ticket in my hand or the gas pedal beneath my feet.  think about leaving the imprint of my body against hotel room sheets, kissing strangers, weak light through cold windows in the mornings.  i want to go, go, go.  i've been hearing people say "i need a vacation" my whole life, and now i finally understand.  fifty states don't seem like enough space to weather my restlessness.  i want an ocean at my back and a long road at my feet.

sometimes i don't even recognize myself in the bathroom mirror.  a different person in a different time. happier and more free that i could have ever been.  disentangled from a life of being rooted, stuck, and always wanting.  now i am a monster in the glass, and i will never have those chest pains again.

these are times that can't be weathered and we have never been back there since.

when two become one

i once knew this man and woman.

real snazzy, power couple in our social circles. they had been dating for a few years; not long enough for a ring but certainly nothing to scoff at either. he did something-or-the-other for a living and she was a so-and-so, i can’t ever remember and i’m not sure it actually matters. all that remains when i think of them is the glow on her face when he put his arm around her waist at parties, the way his eyes crinkled when he heard her laugh. we all wanted to be them, the golden couple, the trophy pairing. all of us shitheads at the time, single and broke and miserable in our shoebox apartments, sat alone eating takeout at night and thought about how much better our lives would be if we could fall asleep with someone at night.

so some of us fucked strangers and some of us dated fleetingly. no one ever had the staying power that they did. when they moved in together there was a housewarming party, all soft lighting and catered food and a tv the size of my mattress. i brought a pineapple upside down cake that no one ate.

at the party she pulled me aside with a quizzical look etched between her eyebrows. she told me that the weirdest things were happening between them. just last week he found his money and stocks in her bank account. two days ago she went rifling through her closet for all her underwear, and found them in his bathroom cabinet. i offered rational explanations with consoling noises (although there is nothing rational about seeing your best lingerie stuffed in a box of q-tips). in the end she laughed it off and poured me another glass of wine.

but nothing ever seemed quite right with them after that. it was hard to see, like making out a landscape through fog clouds, but that couple started to fall apart at the edges. they still made their rounds through bachelor parties and baby showers, smiling and telling all the right jokes, but here and there the discrepancies in their perfect relationship made sly appearances as well. one time they showed up for a dinner party wearing each other’s’ clothes. once during a movie, his hand seemed to be fused to her shoulder for about forty minutes, and i watched the two of them prise and tug at his fingers anxiously long after the credits stopped rolling.

the rest of us couldn’t help but talk about it. we made jokes to ward off how uncomfortable it had become. where it had once been cute to refer to them as “two of a kind” and “made for each other,” it became awkward as they took on each one another’s features. she called me at 2 am once, sobbing and raving. she had woken up in the middle of the night with the strangest sensation in her jaw, as if it no longer fit properly. she examined herself with horror in the bathroom mirror, realizing that it was his teeth in her mouth. she and i had never been that close, so i didn’t know how to respond and began to make conversation about the weather.

soon after we found that we could no longer avert our eyes when he carried her purse and applied her lipstick, could not pretend to not notice once their legs became attached at the ankle and they fought over which shoes would cause less agony. he was cold and scathing when she complained that she could never use their shared arm for any of her own needs. she yelled at him and called him a dick in front of everyone at a restaurant when his food allergies caused their neck to swell up. we stopped inviting them to our get-togethers and they stopped calling too. what was worse than watching the slow, inevitable fusing of two bodies and two lives was realizing that they could not communicate any better for being one person.

last i heard, they had gotten married. i suppose they realized that they could not leave each other, and resigned to a legal commitment to match the physical one. my friend told me that his cousin told him that the bride cried through the wedding night all the while her husband complained that her tears were preventing him from watching tv properly.

i sent them some candles and an apology for not being able to make it to the wedding. i received a thank you card with a nearly illegible message. they had taken liberties to cross out each other’s’ words to replace with their own sentiments until the whole card was a mess of ink, and the only sentence they could agree on was “we hope that one day you will be as lucky in love as we are!”

i burned the card and stayed single.

barely alive & nearly up all night

on clear nights like these, i think will keep driving and never stop.  that i will keep going until my tires burst and fail, until my engines die, until i'm broken down on a lonely stretch of freeway.  and i will pull myself out of the car and walk the rest of the way.  i don't know where i'm going or where i'll be, but i know that it is never far enough away.

and i can write love letters in weak fluorescent light, paper strewn across cracked formica tables in shitty diners across the country.  i can slump over in dark green vinyl seats, shiny and worn with the imprints of a thousand tired travelers.  i'll drink my coffee black and by 10,000 miles i won't even notice the chest pains.  i will stay up night after night, smoking way too many turkish jades, writing stories about brake lights and cold mirrors.

and from new york to l.a., i will carry you with me every step of the way.  i will always be back there, behind the italian restaurant, laughing in your arms while we waltz to muzak.  i will always be caught in that thunderstorm downtown, when you laid me down against cold, wet rocks and kissed me as if you'd die without it.  i will always be trapped in the passenger seat, screaming as yellow headlights wash across your face and the last words you ever said to me play on loop like the soundtrack of my heart slowly failing.

sometimes the only way to handle it is to romanticize it.

accident when we needed

they buried you on a sunday.

so many hands were touching me, so many consoling pats and kind brushes and arms clasping and mouths moving, all i could see were tears and lips and teeth. the funeral was a many-limbed monster of grief and i was its prey standing in silent repose. all i could do was stare at the ground. wet and sinking slowly, the dirt became mush and the mush became quicksand, and all the stringy, glossy ropes of grass were not enough to keep you from being dragged beneath the earth. i could not save you from falling.

the grief monster wreathed me with its fawning arms and told me anecdotes about you, jokes you used to make and sentiments i might never have heard. the monster smiled with its multiple mouths, said you would always love me. it gathered up its purses, umbrellas, prayers, and left in a flurry of tears. it had places to go and people to see, homes flooded with yellow light and warm hugs upon return. someone to hold and fall asleep with at night.

i stood beside you and thought about bones.

about your clavicle, where it met your sternum. about the hours i spent lying tangential to your body geometry, the hours drifting like dust particles in hot sunlight. you always framed me perfectly. when we were young we memorized each other with fingertips, as slowly and seriously as reading braille. written on your body were secret, invisible texts. i studied with hands and you taught me with skin. with muscle. with bones. your beautiful limbs like sun-warmed marble spilling moonlight across dark sheets, the topography of my love.

now your bones were falling away from me, and lifetimes would pass before time and rain and change could erode away the earth to bring you back to me. by then they would be cracked and yellowed with age, unrecognizeable by wear. and no archaeologist would ever know that you were a man who loved a woman, whose body imprinted hers through a thousand sleepless nights.

bones and rubble and dust and dirt.

lancelot & guinevere

i watch your figure pause in the doorway, curves cut out of the liquid yellow light like a bad advertisement for menthol cigarettes. brightness surrenders to the firm lines of your flesh so that i am gazing upon the shadow of a shadow.

i am sitting here foolishly, hands twisting the blanket that brings me no warmth. the only heat i have come to know is the friction between your body and mine. living like this has altered my senses, shifted my tissue, and rearranged my circulatory system.

i am madly in love with you, but you will never know.

"he'll be back in twenty minutes," you remark, distant in your position against the door frame. your voice is cool and sophisticated. it makes me wonder why i am here, with my skeletal frustration, my clumsy hands and awkward voice. every night, i am a little boy all over again.

you change my temperature. you shift my time. you make sure i leave every night at nine. before your husband stumbles in, work-weary and tense. before he is too slow to love you and too quick to come. and then the two of you sleep back to back.

"i know," i say, and untangle myself from what we construct for an hour every night.

i dress myself quickly, fumbling with buttons and zippers, hastily making an exit because lingering brings your flesh braced against bone, your beautiful sleek lines and the way you bite your lower lip. lingering brings your goodbye kiss and it is that which catches in my mouth, my clumsy mouth full of teeth and spit and half-formed words. it catches. it stays. it haunts.

there is no dialogue lost between us because you don't love me for my words, my vocabulary, my impeccable grammar that recedes into darkness when your tongue seeks mine. you don't love me for the way i run my rough, large hand down your tanned cheek and kiss you so softly that our lips barely graze before i lower myself over you.

you don't love me at all.

i leave your house unceremoniously, front door shutting quickly. i walk a block to reach my car. i climb in quietly, fasten my safety belt, drop my head on the steering wheel. i sit in my car and cry.

one day he will trick us and trap us and catch us. one day i will spend my eight o' clock alone in my lifeless apartment and you will find some other way to pass the time. you might even take a vacation, fly away to milan, paris, london. i can see your delicate, long fingers laced in thought as you sit in first class and search for an alternative to your dreary life of settling. but you will never think of me again.  and i will sit in a worn-out couch with another woman filling my hands and whispering dirty, stale, meaningless words into my ear. and i will always be thinking of you. i will always be back in your bedroom with that chenille blanket worn thin by our passion and the shiny mahogany furniture turning a blind eye to my presence. i will always be back inside your arms, between your legs, above your lips. drowning in coffee eyes that wake me and shake me. eyes that bring me alive. eyes that betray casual sex.

i will always be back there, making love to you but you will never know. years after you give birth to your husband's son and the two of you move out of the city to raise a family, i will always be back there, an imprint of the only time i ever really lived, the nights that became a river of something romance novels have yet to define.

my fossil love trapped in your bedroom- the closest i will ever get to you. but you will never know.

i am the shipwreck; you are the island

sunlit, sunlight.

somewhere he wakes up to white, white sky and a landscape of ice that erupts and cracks. every blink is dazzling gold. he does not know where he is or why he is there. he walks across the tundra until his feet first swell with a rush of blood and then give way to hardened black stumps, crusted with snow.

he slips, he falls, he continues.

he is thinking of you, you know. he is remembering the way that thin cotton t-shirt stretched beautifully across your chest, your tousled hair in the weak morning light as you ate bowls of cereal with minimal amounts of milk. he is not quite sure if he is walking towards or away from the warm shapes your hands formed against his rib cages during all those nights you slaughtered in his bed. he does not want to know the truth.

he does not know where you are now, months after you stopped calling and he stopped trying. you closed the door and he lost his keys. the two of you returned to the blue glow of late night sitcoms in separate apartments, separated by an ocean of city lights, smog, and indifference.

he cannot feel his cheeks now, and somewhere deep down he is aware of losing appendages, losing limbs, losing track. none of it matters. somewhere just beyond the horizon, the sunlight threatens to spill itself gloriously across the landscape. it is the color of your hair when the two of you slept in through the afternoon.

somewhere in the distance, the cries of seagulls.

i need you so much closer

there are so many things i want to tell you.

sometimes i think about calling you, dialing your phone number as reflexively as breathing, to hear your tired voice across channels of static after the fourth ring.  i want to tell you, baby i am falling apart at the seams.

and i know you'd laugh and shrug it off because every day i function like a normal girl.  my lungs expand and my blood circulates, i can write with steady hands and speak without a breaking voice.  i can pick up ripe fruit at the grocery store and nod and smile and thank strangers automatically.  i can laugh at jokes in dim restaurants, surrounded by friends whose hugs last a few heartbeats too long at the end of the night.  i sit up straight at work in my ergonomic chair to reply and forward emails for eight hours without pause.

and i want to tell you that this is the easy part, the automation of my life, the ceaseless functions that move my limbs and fix my smile.  but inside i am hollowed out.  there is nothing in a physiology textbook that can explain this, but every minute my chest is clawing like i have been drowning all my life.

i know you wouldn't understand, you'd scoff and tell me i'm fine.  you were never delicate, never tactful.  but your love was there, below the smoker's cough and callused hands.  beneath the blunt words and raised eyebrows.  it was always there.  and so were you.

these are the simplest things to tell you, the sentences that are the most coherent.

the rest is harder to explain.

i want to tell you that i'm sorry i didn't cry at your funeral.

i stood by your grave, hours after hours, and the tears never came.  i could only think about your bones, your beautiful body, close enough to touch but never again able to feel.  something hysterical, deep-rooted in my nerves, screamed for my hands to close around yours for one last time.  and i knew if i held you one last time, i would hold you forever and that six feet would never––could never––come between our bodies.

and i want to tell you that i can still drive that stretch of freeway, even though all my friends thought i would never be able to face 635 after the accident.  but my hands don't tremble on the steering wheel and my eyes still focus straight ahead.  i want you to know that this is the bravest i have ever been.  you used to tease me because i always let those japanese horror movies sink in during the middle of the night, and i'd curl up against you with terrified urgency, clutching at your arms to wake you up as well.  but i drive past that guardrail now, still crumpled and folded in like a horrifying art form, and i try not to see the flashing ambulance lights scattering neon colors into the night.  and thousands of commuters follow me past, their tired eyes peering over paper cups of coffee.  they grind their teeth in bumper-to-bumper traffic, feet jammed on their brakes beside the place where your blood once painted the gravel.  it is just another unbroken line of city scenery, and i do not want to remember you here.  this road is not sacred, this metal is no memorial, and i will not look back through the rearview mirror again.

and i want to tell you that the bullshit people say about time healing all wounds is the emptiest promise ever made.  that this gaping, clutching void inside me has never lessened, not for a single second.  and it feels like i drag myself across the daily landscape with a stomach wound that no one sees, hemorrhaging with your absence.  and i'm so fucking angry that we spent so much of our lives together, irrevocably searing your memories into anything and everything.  i wish it could be as easy as this one song, this one movie, this one place or memory that i could burn, sell, or lock away.  but you fucking permeated everything and no matter where i am, i was there with you first.

and time does not change this, does not lessen this inescapability.

and i want to tell you that i always wake up at night feeling your body in bed, against me, but my eyes open to emptiness and a blank stretch of sheets.  and you'll laugh, but for months i kept a body pillow under our comforter.  so that if i tried i could almost imagine your back curved away from me, your sleep-flushed face buried beneath the blanket.  this is the best part of my life these days, when i close my eyes and sink deep into the warm and golden place where your smile and your hugs are polaroids with blurry edges, flaring softly to life in my dreams.  and i want you to know that every time i wake up, it feels like losing you all over again.

and i want to make this clear to you: that the talisman is not the worst part.  i know that i will take this empty chest with me to the grave, that i will be this hollow forever.  i know that i will see those flashing lights and hear the metallic squeal of brakes until the day i die.  i'll carry it everywhere, but i have accepted this burden as the price of loving you.

i want you to know that the worst part exists in those moments i break down and call you.

your voicemail picks up after five rings, and i'm muffling my sobs in my arms so that i can hear you through the phone.  you tell me you're unavailable right now, but that you'll call me back if i leave a message.

so i leave one.  i leave several.  i fill your voicemail inbox and you haven't called me back.

you'll never call me back.

come in and burn

they say true love only comes around once and you have to hold out and be strong until then. i have been waiting. i have been searching. i am a man under the moon, walking the streets of earth until dawn. there's got to be someone for me. it's not too much to ask. just someone to be with. someone to love. someone to give everything to. someone.

i have been writing for you my entire life.

i know that you are there, and you have been there, and i will wait through another thousand lonely nights to be with you.

practically unsinkable

there are no lighthouses this far out to sea.

i chased you across seven oceans for seven years.  i never caught you, not even for a moment.

there are things i have always wanted you to know.  things that get swept away by the tide.  they get buried below rocks, lost in the current, distilled into treasure for the brave of heart.

i want to tell you that i never stopped loving you, even through the nights you never came home.  the porch light always flickered feebly, a dim beacon to guide your return.  you slammed the screen door and drove so fast you left an imprint in the driveway, but i stayed up and waited through every night.  my face cast glowing blue by the television screen, vision blurring, chest caving.  you came home smelling like him, filling the spaces in my arms with the smoky strangeness of bars and betrayal.  i want to tell you that i screamed inside through every second i held you.  but i never once pulled away.

i want to tell you that i never stopped thinking about you.  i fell apart spectacularly that first year.  i cried, i drank, i smashed windows with my fists and tried to bring the world crashing down around my body.  i smoked endlessly to forget your lips, cigarette after cigarette clamped hard in my mouth while my mind raced in circles for hours on end.  my hands shook every minute; my signature on the divorce papers smeared haphazardly across the page.  i tried to fill them with other women to keep them steady, but none of them ever lasted.  because none of them were you.  even now, years later, i feel your phantom fingers entwined with mine.  they trace promises and lies across my palms.  they spell out "you'll never forget me."

i want to tell you that this is the last letter i will ever write you.  they pile up in my study, pages and pages of unsent love and hurt and desire.  they fill the corners of my room and the spaces in my mind.  i have spent all my life reading about great and ruinous lovers, the stories of lancelot and guinevere, the stories that remind me of your back pushed against the sink mirror and my hips pressing into your legs.  the television screen flickering test patterns of the lust factor, your anemic kiss tugging at my lower lip.  the stories of us through the ages, crude replicas of our love with smoke and mirrors flattery.  you died last month when i finally forgave you for leaving me.  and then you left me all over again.  your house is empty, repackaged and resold, and there is no one to mail these letters to anymore.  and so i sit here, shipwrecked, the sole survivor.  smashed up against our memories and scattered out to sea.  until i stop writing about you.

until i stop writing about you.

until i stop writing about you.

until i stop writing about you.