birthday
I knew this girl when I was young and one night she decided that she’d tell me her life story but she said she couldn’t handle so much hurt at once so she’d just stick to third person thankyouverymuch. Here it is:
She was born and her parents wept, on the outside because she was finally here and all the clothes and toys and dreams of a perfect child would finally mean something, on the inside because they saw in her tiny toes and matted hair that they were bound together for life.
She met a boy on the playground and thought they should be friends but he said something so powerful she still can’t remember what it was and he kicked her and beat her and made her feel so small that all she could think to do was run to her mother. Her mother brought her back to the playground, hunting for the boy, and secretly the girl wished they would find him because maybe it would make her mother feel something.
She fell somewhere along the line and found herself curled up, a monstrous fetus, pulsing and raw, in the bathtub of her parents’ unfinished basement with a razor blade in her hand and nothing in her heart. It gets blurry here.
She stopped eating meat and started eating words.
She fell in love with the wrong boy and didn’t do a goddamn thing about it even when she knew because to leave would be to start healing and she just couldn’t picture it so when he fucked her at night she pretended she was a doll because dolls can’t feel pain.
It gets a bit unclear here, dear. My apologies.
She thought she knew the difference between good and evil but found out she was wrong because they aren’t real at all, you know, and if you put them in a ship and sail them out to sea neither will float because it’s their job to sink sink sink in soak in sleep in sneak in sweet grin more gin, please please please.
You know what you mean to me? Everything.
wish i still knew you
and when you look at me, all I can see anymore are your eyelashes, gently curved, pushing up, out, away from your hurt. please try to join them, would you?
(someone is plotting to make you happy)
a february tuesday
Sometimes I think survival is all I can hope for.
need you to show me I’m wrong.
please.
winter
It’s not even snowing and my car gets towed from right in front of my own house but I don’t even mind because I’m just so happy to exist.
Dropped off at the grandstand track by a stranger and she asks me if I want to race before I go. I say no thanks on the race, but you’re wonderful. Hope you have an amazing day.
And it’s so goddamn cold outside, sure, and when I connect the heater with the outlet the lights flicker for a moment like they’re just too tired to keep running.
But we’ve got each other.
late night musings
So I’ve got this idea. I pick up and leave this place. Maybe take some books, some pens and journals, but not much else. I’ll walk the highways, staring down at my feet as they touch the ground and politely refusing ride offers as I trek my way to somewhere. Somewhere with life, Somewhere absolutely teeming with life and love and need and hope… Somewhere. Anywhere, really. I’ll count my steps, over and over and over.
1 (life)
2 (love)
3 (need)
4 (hope)
I’ll be so ready to get Somewhere that it won’t even bother me that my steps are resting on even numbers. I’ll be so filled with love that nothing else will matter. I won’t even see the cars and I won’t breathe in their exhaust. Everything’ll be just fine, and I’ll know it’s true because I got this letter from Somewhere, this letter that says “We’re waiting for you.” And I’ll just keep walkin’ ‘til I find it.
oh, and I just want to say that I’d love for you to join me.
need you to hold me close
Tonight I feel like I’m falling apart.
Could I tell you something? I’m very glad you’re here.
I’m Finally There
Yeah, I think that maybe this is the start of something dazzling, love, because I never thought I’d find somebody I could tell my secrets to. I’m not, I’m not perfect and its time to let you know that if you want me you’ll have to take me as is, as is, love. I may not know where to go from here but I dream in color and if you’ll let me I’ll save us both.
Save. Us. Both. I will. We will, love.
I think, I think I know what you need because I need it too and if we got it we should keep it. Keep it, breathe it, dream it, taste it, run it through our veins and I’ll never want to let my blood escape, never, ever let it leave this vessel again.
And sometimes, sometimes you might feel like falling and I know I will too, but this thing, this thing we’ve got will wrap its wings around us before we hit the ground, love, and cradle all our agonies until we’re ready, ready to ball them up into something beautiful and throw it out for the world, for the world to catch.
You ask me why I feel so deeply for you and the best answer I can give, love, is that I write such crazy run-on sentences about you and I can’t stop to take a breath because if I do it might just be my last because you know, I think I want to die happy. I think I want to die happy, love, and I’m finally there.
hey… I’m talking to you
For the Rest of Our Lives
At the grocery store last night there was a long line at the registers. I started unloading my things at the self-checkout because there was no wait there, but at the last second I changed my mind, opting to wait ten minutes in line and have a little human contact. I watched the cashier’s face as I waited, watched as the woman in line ahead of me filled out her check silently. The cashier stared out the window, not smiling, not frowning, not… anything. Just blank.
It hurt.
The check-writing woman gathered her things and left, not thanking the cashier, Karen (I was now close enough to read her nametag), not even nodding or smiling. Before beginning to unload my cart, I looked right at Karen and smiled the biggest smile I could muster. “Hi. How are you?”
Karen blinked and tipped her head up, meeting my eyes. “I’m doing good,” she said, and the hint of a smile emerged on her chapped lips.
“That’s wonderful,” I grinned. And I really meant it.
I waved goodbye to Karen when she’d finished ringing me up, and as I walked out into the bitter, icy rain, I understood that I’d just made her night a little bit better, and she’d made mine a little better, too.
And my veins got this rush of overwhelming love for you, for us, because I realized that you and I will be doing that to people for the rest of our lives.
First Freewrite of the Year
His name was David. I’d known this since the seventh grade, when he sat two seats behind me every afternoon on the school bus and we never spoke. Our bus driver, a blonde woman with three gold rings on her right hand and a deep cough, would drop him off at the end of his driveway and yell “Goodnight, David!” out her open window as he stood at his front door, scouring his backpack for the key. The front door to David’s house was a dark blue, like ocean currents and the night sky. I used to think about what the label on the can of paint would say: midnight, denim blue, deep cerulean? With the exception of the occasional sick day and once in a while when my mom picked me up from school, this was our routine until I was old enough to get a license and my own car.
I wish I could say that I’d wanted to talk to him, wanted to reach out and connect at least one fucking time amongst the hundreds of opportunities I’d been given, but it just isn’t true. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him. It wasn’t that I was above hanging out with him (in fact the reverse was probably true. In the later years, he and his friends would never have been seen with the likes of me.) I let each day, each potential moment, pass only out of laziness. I never struck up a conversation about the color of his front door. I never told him that I liked his new hat. I never asked him if he liked his parents or what music helped him through the nights. I just never got around to uttering that one simple word: “Hey.”
I used to work as a checkout girl at a grocery store. The only grocery store in town at the time, actually. David came in sometimes. Once, he came through my line. It was the express lane (sometimes things are steeped in meaning and the irony won’t hit you in the face until years later, when it hurts enough to cripple you.) I don’t remember what he bought, maybe some energy drink, maybe a lighter or some gum. What I do recall is his gloves. Grey and tattered, they were the sort with missing fingertips and a fold-over mitten top. He’d had them pulled back while digging in his pocket, and when he handed me the crumpled bills I noticed the left mitten-top had a hole in it. He looked past me, over my shoulder and into something else entirely as I typed numbers into the register. (Can I tell you a secret? On nights when I feel I’m caving in, I wonder what he was thinking in that moment.)
His change was twenty-seven cents. One quarter and two pennies, dirty and metallic. One quarter and two pennies that’d been passed through thousands of hands, thousands of lives. I placed them in the center of his open, grey-gloved hand and watched him walk away, passing up what would be my last opportunity to reach out and just speak to him.
David is dead now. For months after his accident rumors circulated about the details. The daughter of the fire chief told a friend who told a friend that he’d been nearly decapitated. That his femurs had been poking through his new jeans: jeans the color of the night sky, the color of his front door, ripped apart by the raw beauty of bone. We’d heard that his skin, once the site of study hall Sharpie artwork, was so shredded that even the police officers couldn’t look at it without instinctively retching. What I kept wondering about, though, were his thumbs.
Somebody, somewhere, once told me that if you curl your hands around the steering wheel while you drive, your thumbs would be ripped from you if the airbag deploys. I had no real reason to believe this. No facts, no statistics, no charts, no public service announcements to back it up; just the gnawing unease in the back of my skull every time I caught myself driving that way. But I did believe it. I do.
The day David died, it was cold. The kind of cold where you put on warm, well-worn mittens and wrap your fingers tightly around the steering wheel, tense and waiting for the heater to kick in.
He lost his fucking thumbs, and all I ever gave him before he left was twenty-seven cents.
So, here I am, reaching out to you before we die. I am quite certain we will save the world together.
