i need you like life needs life

i want to believe in it, you know. the greatness, the all-encompassing massiveness of the thing. the unsinkable, unbreakable, unchained, unkept and recklessly inconvenient enormity of it. i want to believe that i was shipwrecked and storm-tossed into your arms, your island, safe harbor in an unforgiving sea. that love––true love––really does transcend life and death and space in ways that has our bodies meeting in different forms, different cities, different centuries until the end of time. and your fingers will always trace my cheek the same way, in this smoky bar, in this leather chair, in this studio apartment, in this hospital bed, in this cold coffin. that each time i will find you over and over again, and nothing will ever possess the power to come between us. i want to believe that love triumphs destiny, that we will move mountains with bleeding, slippery hands to bring you back home to me. that this is real––unknowable, untamable, untouched by cynicism or restraint. that i will wage wars and set fires and rewrite history to keep you safe. that it will only ever be you that i feel this much for.

and it will only ever be you who's worth this much and more.

taking it all back

––and they tell me that it'll get better, that time heals all wounds, but i am finding your face in the bottom of shot glasses every single night and i think the next drink could take me further from here.  and your parents call to check on me, and the counselor writes dates on business cards, but i am tasting your lips on strangers' cigarettes and i think the next inhale could bring me closer to you.

closer to that place with my back shoved against craig's guest bathroom mirror, your fingers digging into my thighs, prying them apart on that cracked porcelain sink and your teeth at my neck (always, those teeth at my neck) and we are laughing or gasping or moaning in that dizzying amber light and i am falling asleep beside you on a stranger's futon, in your childhood bed, on our living room floor, on blankets in the wild, my head cradled in your arms and you are stroking my hair and whispering stories about all the lives we could live together, you are saying mimi, i am going to love you until the day i die and then i am clutching you from behind while you are sweating, shaking, coming down hard, and i am wiping the tears from your face when you grind your teeth and beg me eloquently for just one more fix to get you through the night, and then we are driving thousands of miles cross-country in your dirty grey jeep stealing packets of peanut m&ms from gas stations and eating burnt hash browns in late night diners or we are running through rain-slicked streets holding hands and laughing breathlessly while the wind whips through our jacket hoods and you are flushed with whiskey and pushing me hard on the kitchen floor and my head is snapping back from the force of your blows and i am finding your name in my mouth like a hated speech defect, catching on my teeth and tongue over and over and over again while i choke hard on the sobs and you are telling me baby i'm sorry and i am believing every single word and i think i could live like this with my red lipstick stains on your clavicle and your smoker's cough across static phone lines and our hands locked in this perfect destructive grip but we are crashing through that guardrail spectacularly and your face is washed in brake lights and cold fear and i am waking up in a hospital bed alive with plastic tubes and rubber hands and they are reading me the coroner's report they are running toxicity labs they are telling me stories about funeral homes and in lieu of flowers i am digging hard into my arms to bring you back to me––

––and i think i will find myself running back to your grave, over and over again every night, feet pounding on slick grass and carbonized corpses.  and i will find you beneath layers of dirt and sediment, i will find you and bring you back with every clawing handful deeper and deeper down until my fingers brush your bones again.  and then i am awake on my bathroom floor, naked and shivering against that full-length mirror, staring wide-eyed at these pale legs covered in bruises,

realizing that i never knew what my body looked like before you shaped it with your hands and mouth.

fifty states, fifty lines

i had that nightmare again.  the one with the brake lights, the wet road, the vice grip of that seatbelt against my shoulder.

sometimes i think these memories don't belong to me, and that you never really existed.  that you are just a mid-range tombstone in september soil, a relic of a relic amid world war 2 vets and hypoxic infants.  that i am just a girl with bruised knees, bleeding lips, and too many words in my mouth.  and this could just be a funnel for my anger, for my mistakes, for a heartbreak worn like a badge of honor and polished to a blinding shine.

and you could be a collection of bones compact beneath earth, a collector's item for archaeologists,  a boy who never really belonged to me at all.

too much but not enough

i'm sorry about your eulogy.

your mother wanted me to write it.  her voice broke when she asked me, catching in sobs across that long-distance call.

mimi, you're a writer, she told me tearfully.  you could write a beautiful eulogy.

fiction, i thought dully after we hung up.  i only write fiction.

so i sat for hours staring at a blank screen.  i wrote for no one but you for seven years, but somewhere along the way i ran out of words.

that sunday came suddenly, and i stood beside your gravesite reading a eulogy that did not belong to you.   in a stranger's voice that did not belong to me.  i invented anecdotes about the person you used to be, creating broad brushstrokes of a caricature i once used to know.  your friends and family watched me speak with wide, guileless eyes, searching desperately between my sentences for measures of comfort.  i gave them hallmark sentiments and it might have been enough.

your father thanked me after the funeral, told me it was a poignant speech.

you're a hell of a writer, he said quietly.  your mother nodded wanly in agreement, her face ashen and glittering with tear tracks.

fiction, i thought mirthlessly, after all the funeral guests left.  it was only fiction.

and i think about what i should have written, the last words i could've ever said to your face.  that even though my bed is cold and i have missed you like a visceral absence in this space between my heart and lungs, that i have never once forgotten the real memories you left, the ones that kept me up at night.  and it wouldn't have been pretty or delicate, not a carefully crafted speech about your love and bravery.  it would've been an ugly stream-of-consciousness with no rhyme or reason, spat viciously between choking sobs because the only thing i could think of when i looked into your casket was how you had fucked me over for the very last time.

a near miss or a close call

she comes to my register and she is all soft curves and freckled shoulders, a cascade of strawberry curls spilling to her back. and i think that she is beautiful- the most beautiful girl i've ever seen- even under these buzzing fluorescent lights that carve hard shadows and skeletal masks out of every face beneath them. and at first i can't tell that her stomach is swollen under her faded grey tank top, straining the thinning fabric as she lines up her purchases on the conveyer belt with shaking hands. and i'm so mesmerized by her long eyelashes that i think for a moment they cast blue-black shadows across her cheekbones. but those are bruises on her face. and bruises around her wrists. and bruises across her throat. then her items come tumbling through my scanner, three little bottles with a silent story. i ring up aspirin, covergirl liquid foundation, equate personal lubricant. she does not look at me, does not even speak, and pays with crumpled dollar bills. and i am trying desperately to find my voice- i have these words on the edge of my mouth- but the next customer is pushing a rotisserie chicken onto my scanner and she is walking away with an awkward, pained gait that collapses my heart completely.

bring you back to me

i got lost on my way to the morgue.

you'd laugh at me, chalk it up to my inability to decipher maps or directions.  you used to chide me for being unprepared for our dinner dates, eagerly buckling my seat belt and jamming the key in the ignition without even knowing where the restaurant was located.  you'd look it up for me, half-exasperated, half-enamored by my relentless flightiness.  i'd back out of my parking space clumsily while you twiddled through maps on your phone, accidentally turning right when you tell me left.

and you'd always say, remind me to drive next time.

i should've looked up directions to the hospital on my phone, but i dropped it after that call.  the glass shattered against the concrete sidewalk, and i think the battery case cracked and split with an ugly sound.  i left it where it landed, and pushed mechanically through the crowd.  somebody behind me said miss, you dropped your phone, but it became white noise through the rushing in my ears.  and it seemed i couldn't get to my car fast enough, as if every air molecule became a grain of sand and my legs wobbled as i fought to move through.  a dream sequence running, torturously slow wading.

i made countless u-turns to find the place, scraping my tire against too many curbs because of my car's awful turn radius.  several people honked at me as i lunged across lanes or cut sharply through traffic in my confusion.  a man in a silver audi tt rolled down his window to berate me with a shout.  asshole!  he barked at me, his sunburnt face livid with road rage.

i thought about his face for several more hours.  i only caught the briefest glimpse of a receding hairline, hawk-like nose, straight white teeth, and sagging jowls.  but it was this face i saw when they unzipped your body bag, pulling away the crinkling plastic as brusquely and effortlessly as peeling a banana.

and it was you, but it wasn't you.  your face was more still and expressionless than i had ever seen it.  even through the nights i stayed up to grade papers, watching you sleep on the couch, your brow was always wrinkled with dreamscape concerns, twitching fitfully through the hours.  but in that bag, on that shelf, underneath those eerie fluorescent lights that were just as stark and sickening as they looked on television crime dramas, you looked like a waxwork of your former self.  an unreal artistic rendering of the person you used to be.

i didn't want to remember your face like that, so i closed my eyes.  and all i could see was that angry man who glowered at me from his rolled-down window.  and i thought that it could be him, and not you, here in this hospital morgue.  and that i could drive home and find you back in our apartment, standing in the kitchen in that ridiculous apron shaped like a chicken that your mother sent us last christmas.  you would be starting dinner at this time in the evening; you were always the better cook.  and i'd take my shoes off in the hallway and call out, baby i'm home.

and i could tell you about how i got lost on my way to the hospital, and you'd roll your eyes but hold me in close for a hug and say,

remind me to drive next time.

the mind turns an itch into a bruise

write "my mother never..." at the top of a page, then complete the sentence and keep going.

my mother never had a routine physical. most of my childhood memories took place in hospitals––the astringent, clinical scent of antiseptic, the tactile pressure of latex gloves, the calming voices of diagnosticians distracting me as cold hands moved forward with hidden syringes. but my mother never so much as filled a prescription for herself or scheduled a doctor’s appointment. once, a triage nurse jocularly suggested an EKG for her. i remember the flinty, darting narrowing of my mother’s eyes, the fierceness radiating from her sunken scowl that blanketed the rest of our intake procedure with silence.

she was a sharp, neurotic woman, both in and out of hospitals and doctors’ offices. she spoke to my father in a voice constantly pitched at an anxious bark. over the years, i saw her truculence wear on him, a slow and steady grinding that filled our recycling bins with sticky empty bottles.  one night towards the end of my 7th grade year, he checked over my geometry homework with bleary, bloodshot eyes. mom wants me to stay home from school tomorrow, i whispered conspiratorially. she thinks i’m running a fever. but i hear there’s going to be a pop quiz. i shouldn’t miss it; i don’t want to stay home. i confided in him, a plea for parental intervention. but he just swayed where he sat, his gaze slightly unfocused as we looked at each other for several painfully long moments.

she wasn’t like this before you were born, he finally said, a flat accusation. you did this to her.

i was quiet then. i was always quiet. as i was docile and obedient when she flitted around me like an anxious insect, haranguing doctors and nurses who rapidly tired of her hypochondria. i was only 7 years old when i came to recognize that constant exasperation, the way medical professionals rolled their eyes at each other in mutual understanding when she dragged me into waiting rooms. i was only 10 years old when i became embarrassed by the size of my medical chart, humiliated when physicians sent letter after letter addressed to my mother, formally severing our provider-patient relationships. i didn’t know what it truly meant, only that she would stalk angrily to the weathered yellow pages sitting dog-eared on the kitchen table and start flipping through for new doctors. pediatricians. hematologists. cardiologists. endocrinologists. i recognized more medical specialties than disney princesses, spent my summer vacations watching vial after vial of blood withdraw from my body. my classmates came back to school with tan lines and stories about theme parks; i came back with the telltale mark of pressure bandages and three more dispelled diagnoses.

there’s nothing wrong with her, the doctors all told her with barely-concealed impatience. she’s perfectly healthy. you can’t bring her into the emergency department every time she gets a bruise.

it could be a symptom of hemophilia! my mother would counter, eyes widening. she could be hemorrhaging internally, you need to find out!

but i was fine then. i was always fine. and my mother neglected her own health in favor of her weirdly transferred, chronic hypochondria. she finally succumbed to a brain aneurysm during my freshman year of high school. my father broke down crying during the funeral, weeping into his wrinkled suit sleeves with unrestrained sobs. and our family and friends patted him awkwardly on the back, tracing their own demure tears away with kleenex and subversive swipes.

i did not console him. i was silent, as i always had been, as i always would be. a statue in a sea of mourners. and when i looked down into the open casket at my mother’s face, i saw it was finally smoothed of its perpetual anxiety by careful embalming. and then the only thought running through my head was finally, no more goddamn hospital trips.

and if i was ashamed or appalled by my own feelings, no one could tell.

too late for long goodbyes

take one intense emotion you've experienced and give it to a fictional character. 

you are standing in front of me, eyes cast heavily towards the floor, magnetized to your shuffling feet. we stand juxtaposed in the frozen food aisle in whole foods, a ridiculous still life of domestic repose as i clutch a box of amy's organic tofu scramble in my hands and your head turns away from me with studied aversion. an angular blonde woman in a tracksuit passes us on her trajectory towards soy ice cream products, stares with careful concealed curiosity. and when i finally find my voice, it is alien in my throat. a struggling, stillborn thing that escapes with deadened finality.

are you leaving me?

your response comes slowly and hesitantly, and you never once look up. you have obliviously cut and polished these words to hurt, honing them with years of practiced lies and neglect.

you have never loved me, not even for a minute.

as the frozen dinner thaws and wilts in my unfeeling hands, you tell me that we are moving in different directions, that you no longer feel the same way about me, that you have met someone at your new job and he took you out for drinks last friday. and i think to myself dazedly, struggling to recall with genuine curiosity what i was doing that night while you texted me haphazard apologies for working late yet again.

i was booking a hotel room for our anniversary, i realize silently with dawning wonderment. our nine year anniversary.

i'm sorry, you say pointlessly, your fingers wrapping endlessly around your ponytail. the part of me that has known and loved you since my earliest college days recognizes that you are nervous. that you have failed to prepare for this moment. and so bizarrely, in deft desperation, you have chosen this moment in time to sever our relationship with naked truth. your engagement ring gleams mockingly, caught in the cross-section of overhead fluorescent lights, reminding me of every step paved towards the ten thousand dollar promise on your finger.

the numb, fetal pain in my throat claws southward into my chest, a pleural wave of panic and nausea. there is a physiological threat of overflow, a frantic pressure building behind my eyes that is hot and stinging. i am lightheaded in this moment, still clutching onto this defrosting boxed dinner as if it is a life preserver. as if i can regain my footing, step back in time.

back to nine minutes ago, when i opened the frosted freezer doors and asked what do you want for dinner, honey?

back to nine days ago, when i woke up with my arms around you, my face in familiar repose against your soft, raspberry-scented hair. and you turned in my arms, eyes still closed, lips finding mine with the practiced ease of lovers with intrinsic muscle memory.

back to nine months ago, when i knelt down against hard rock and wet grass in the park where we first kissed, beneath the clearest night sky i had ever seen in nashville. i remember the words nearly catching in my throat, the feeling of my pants sodden against my knees, as i looked up and said i want to spend the rest of my life loving you.

back to nine years ago, when i first saw you in our introductory english class, arriving late in jeans so tight that multiple rows of otherwise sleepy freshmen swiveled in their seats to gape. and you slung your lean, long-limbed frame into the farthest corner of the lecture hall. and i was lining up my pencils in descending order from longest to shortest, then again by color. and we locked eyes for just a moment then, but it set my chest on fire, bathing me in nervousness and excitement.

that same chest is heaving now, holding in the dizzying feeling of titanic pressure that threatens to collapse it completely, as you say, you have no bearing on my life.

as i hold this frozen box pointlessly, and something inside of me finally breaks loose.

as the other grocery shoppers avert their eyes with embarrassment, or gaze openly with awkward curiosity, or hurry past completely oblivious.

as you back away with uncomfortable avoidance, your eyes desperate for any contact point that is not me, this broken man, this savage stranger.

as i am crying in the frozen food aisle of whole foods, hands shaking with cold and pain and heartbreak.

thus spoke zarathustra

when i first met you i remembered the women i had seen on the streets and in my building. i rehearsed their bright, uninspired laughs and you were pleased with my pantomime. i took you home and we read books together. one night your hands found a home against my skin and you bit my neck whispering god is dead.

you already know how it ends

you already know how this will end.

we sit side-by-side on this bed, eyes forward, untouching and unfeeling. as you tell me you have met someone else, or else we are moving in different directions, or else you no longer love me, or else it is you and not me, or me and not you. and i flinch when you touch me one last time, a conciliatory grasp of my fingers or else a palm against my cheek, one final gaze between a pair of irises that have been magnetized to one another for years. and i push you away, hot angry tears spilling down my face, or else i drop to my knees and beg you- eloquently and desperately––to stay with me. for just one more hour, one more night, one more lifetime. or else i lash out, a wounded animal striking feral, smashing anything and everything my hands can seek out in this room. in this room where you once laid me down against the floor and told me you would be gentle. in this room where you once kissed me on the cheek and told me you would love me forever. in this room where we sit now, strangers distant as parallel lines as you tell me we can never intersect. as you tell me we can stay friends, or else we should not stay friends, or else you want your things back, or else i can keep them all as memoirs of a time when my fingers interlocked with yours.

or

i find a perfume that is not mine, was never mine, rolling with a glassy amber wink below the bed. and i confront you, throwing it against the wall with a terrible, anguished velocity. dismayed when it doesn’t shatter because the bottle is plastic, a cheap replica of desire. or else i hide it in my sock drawer, returning to stare at it with indeterminable sadness and loathing through all the nights you don’t come home to me. or else i throw it out in the trash, feeling nothing but numbness thawing to relief when you call me from the office to tell me you’re working late again. and we fight endlessly as the calendars peel off the walls, conversing through broken dinner plates. and sometimes the neighbors call the cops and i answer the door with a brilliant smile, bruises blossoming silently below my shirt. or else we eat quietly, separately every night. me in the kitchen, you in the dining room, an ocean of white noise between us. stretched out through the house like tripwire, silence. and we sleep back-to-back, or else you sleep in the guest room, but we wake up early enough to hug and kiss in pantomime for our children when they tumble downstairs sleepily for breakfast. and then we sign these papers, with our lawyers sitting stony-faced across from one another like chess pieces carved out of wool suits and leather briefcases. or else we do not sign papers––do not even discuss them––but live two separate, pained lives in this house that is not a home. or else one day i come back to your belt as a noose, strung up in the guest room closet, a suicide letter in your hand––i have had enough. or else one day you come back to an emptied, ransacked bedroom with a hastily scribbled note on the bathroom mirror––i am leaving you.

or

they come to me in that hospital waiting room, my nerves frayed thin by hours and hours of fluorescent light bouncing off sticky linoleum and the same crumpled tabloid magazines shuffling from one tired grasp to another. and i know how i must look, half-dead with lack of sleep, my hair in disarray, my hands arthritic and shaking with fear. and it is the doctor himself, not nursing staff, not some patient care advocate with a sickly, placating smile. and the doctor’s face is a study in stoicism, giving nothing away as he says you were given power of attorney in his advance directive. and he does not need to elaborate, does not need to tell me the tenets of your living will. we wrote ours together, your beautiful script at odds with my sloppy one. reflecting, in our old age, what it meant to prepare for the worst. and we are here now, at the end of the storm together, but you cannot hear me or feel me. you have been gone for months, and our home is empty with you––a museum enshrined to your memory as our daughter calls funeral chapels and makes arrangements to displace me into retirement housing. i follow the doctor to your bed, a lonely corner of the intensive therapy unit, and they give me papers to sign. sheet after sheet of legal responsibility, to decide here and now that your life will end. that our life will end. that we will never know another anniversary, another photograph, another conversation. and in this moment, in this bed, your face is worn unrecognizable by time and triumphs and disappointments, a road map of a life fully lived. but i remember you as i first saw you that thursday afternoon forty years ago, in the golden autumn sunlight. you were beautiful to me then, as you are now, as you always will be. and i kiss you and say goodbye, and they disconnect your life support. your chest heaves shallow breaths, your bones nearly avian in their hollow lightness as i hold your body close to me. as the nurses avert their eyes in embarrassment, as the doctor grimly notes time of death, as part of me dies here as well, beside you for the very last time.

a year and the pacific

i was working as a palliative care nurse that year, licensed and loaned for communion with the dying.  those hospital beds became homes, you know, sterile islands for survivors shipwrecked by their own bodies.  by degenerative neurological, by autoimmune, by AIDS, by cancer.

and he had a photo, yellowed with age, propped up against a cheap vase filled with crumbling flowers.  he was young in this picture, all mirrored shades and dirty hair, his arm slung around a pretty slip of a girl with pale curls and straight teeth.

"kelly," he said once, his eyes glazing over.  "is she coming back soon?"

and i told him yes, then dosed him with morphine.

i listened to grandparents calling out for their children's children, heard the aged and weary talk to invisible monsters in the clutches of dementia.  they told me about past lives, old friends, favorite haunts, estranged families.   i changed catheter bags and took confessions.  so i waited for him to tell me about kelly, but he never did.  and she never came.

non-hodgkins lymphoma took him like a bullet to the chest, pressing against his lungs with fluid malignancy, slowing down his breathing.  i watched his legs purple with bruises that blossomed overnight like vivid, terrible flowers.

and while he slipped in and out of comas, i waited for someone to come for him.  maybe even kelly, her hair silvering with age and lines of grief etched around a mouth that once beamed so brightly for the polaroid camera.

but his bedside always stayed empty, an unread invitation returned to sender.

and the last night i heard his labored breathing drag to a ragged, painful crawl, i asked him,"what do you need?"

he said, "give me a year and the pacific.  i will find her again."

write drunk, edit sober

forget my legs around your hips, forget your lips against my ear, forget my teeth against your neck. and replace you with the taste of strangers in my mouth, searching every night in the bottom of bottles but i can never fucking find it.  i have never even come close.  i can only know the hard edges of motel card keys, the smell of smoke in my clothes, your creased and folded obituary. i read it time and time again.  and i can't get this any clearer, can't fight this off- it's six months later and i am still always fucking graveside.  thinking about the time you said, mimi, i want to spend the rest of my life with you.  no drink lasts long enough.  no night is savage enough.  nothing ever comes close and i wake up to bruises on my arms and blood in my mouth.

monsters in the glass

sometimes it is the things that are not said between the things that are, a glimpse and a crevice of what could have been and who you could be.

my mind is a remote that skips away the possibilities.

you might as well be anyone.

and if our fingers ever click into place like metacarpal puzzle pieces, do not be alarmed.

we are only ever malleable metals shaped by need- press onto me.

i will bend before i break.

sound the alarm, i've got a fire in my chest

you are beautiful beneath my fingertips, around my body, against my skin during those off-kilter moments when your mind is probably a world away but next to you my heart is pounding.

i feel like a third grade kid at her birthday party when i look at you. and i want time to solidify like glass windows and trickle down slowly, minutely. it makes my vena cava knot itself into a noose. i know that i could never have you forever. so for the moment, as my face tries to find a home against your shoulderblades and my fingers clutch at yours' like a child, i imagine putting on my birthday girl tiara and seeing everyone throw balloons and streamers.  you're my day of celebration, the moment that makes me grateful for being alive.

here in this bed, my heart is swelling past my rib cage.

if i had the power to make people feel this way about me, i'd be immortal too.

you said "i love you" and i really believed you

all lights are out and all bets are off.

we stand in the driveway of my childhood home, your lean lines a sprawling angular darkness against my car, my awkward hands anchored in pockets. i stare up at a face i've known for five years, loved for four, and resented for god-knows-how-many. here we are finally strangers because my tongue has swollen to a clumsy, unfamiliar mass and i am tripping over words that are an alien language. the semantics of relationship.

autumn winds are rising and this coldness is no longer restrained to the dead space between our bodies as i fumble for your fingers and they latch together like bad puzzle pieces.

remnants of childhood corkboard that has been pressed, pushed, and creased in the corners.

you wrote a story that you sold to me

there is always this part of a person, after crushing defeat, that says i will never do this again.  and you think you might have lost this capacity to believe that love is ever anything but an illusory compilation of desire and fear.  that everything eventually becomes water in your hands.  that there was never a lighthouse in the storm, just a desperate mirage that pulled you in to become wreckage against unknowable cliffs.  and you know that if you stop romanticizing it for even a minute, the gold paint will peel off slowly to expose nothing but lead- a broken and cheap imitation that fooled you for years.

so i realize that men who get close to me have always wanted something from me.  and i think i could give myself away in pieces, and never think twice about being hollowed out by loss.  that i could feel nothing, and treasure nothing, and never be fooled again by the ruinous perception of need.

and this is why i am cynical.

then, there is this other part.  this part that excavates itself from me in truetype fonts. i have been writing love letters my entire life.  i have penned poems, verses, stories about this one person, this phantom love.  boys have pressed against my body, and their fingers have interlocked with mine, but no one has fit the prose, not truly.  no matter how much i wanted them to.

i remember a time in my past life, when i said i want what i write.

and he sneered, fiction?

my heart broke then, as it always did, as it always has.  and i stopped writing that year because everything i typed felt like a codified lie. the one about a girl who has been searching for love between dog-eared pages in a library book.

but deep down––and certainly bruised, so much worse for the wear––there is a fire still burning in that hollowed-out space.  i know that i will wake up one morning beside the man whom all these love letters were fated for.  and he will not be fiction, but flesh-and-blood, an imperfect human capable of perfect love.

and this is why i am romantic.

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.