Happy and Imaginary.

When you tell your best friend what happened, the only part she can grasp is that you were out with the boy she liked. The rest of it doesn’t matter. The rest of it doesn’t matter and this is what you hold onto for the next two years. That’s two years of Facebook notifications about his birthday. Two years of his late night text messages. That’s 728 days of just the possibility of this boy coming into the place you work and smiling at you from across the bar. He only does it a handful of times. You watch him sip beer with the same mouth he pressed to your neck. He comes in with his family and introduces you to his mother. The next time this boy comes up in conversation with someone, you are out to lunch with a friend at the Inner Harbor. You wear your hair down. You have a new green dress. You crumble crackers into cream of crab soup and his name slips out over a spoonful. So casually. You can say it without even wincing, but you can’t look your friend in the eye when she asks why she never sees you at the bar anymore. You tell her what happened without using the buzzwords. You just hand over the details like you’re passing bread or a salt shaker. You talk about his hands and ask the waitress for more iced tea in the same breath. This is the first time somebody calls it rape and it sounds like such an ugly word. A back alley word. Not a word for the kind of botched date you had. It could have almost been romantic until he pinned you down. And anyway you still let him drive you home. You didn’t cry when he hugged you in public a month later. You just stood still until he was done. Kind of like before only with witnesses this time. And that’s how you talk to yourself about it for the next three years. That’s three years of him watching your snapchat stories. Three years of your friends still hanging out with him. That’s three years of wondering if it was really as bad as you remember it or if it’s just the writer in you that likes to embellish your own stories. When you write your first poem about it, you talk about bursting instead of blooming and summer and the way hammocks make you feel queasy. You don’t mention the tiny American flags in his front yard or the fact that you had Electronics class with his brother in high school. You don’t mention small town dynamics or the way that trying to cut him out of your life while you still live there would stir up more trouble than his hands ever did. You don’t mention how five years too late, this boy texts you and says he’s sorry that he didn’t treat you right and then he asks you over to split a bottle of wine; how you almost go but your body works out the threat faster than your head and you spend the night dry heaving in your bathroom. When you write this poem, there are still things you’re not mentioning.

I think it’s because there was no blood. or because it wasn’t violent, or because he didn’t enter me, or because it was quick, or because he was the first person to want to touch me, or because I was supposed to like it, or because this was supposed to happen, or because everyone had a story like this, or because others have stories that are worse, or because I let him into my house, or because I let him, or because I let myself lie there, or because I didn’t cry afterwards, or because it took years to give it a name, or because no one would believe me, or because everyone would, or because I didn’t want any more bad things, or because I wanted to want it, or because I wanted to feel something other than scared, or because I didn’t know what to call it, or because he said he had been in love with me for six years, since we met, two children in a classroom, sharing a smile that he read like an invitation, like we knew what would happen years later, like a love story, like a fairy tale, or because I thought he had earned the right, after all that patience, or because I wanted to believe him, or because he said he loved me and I wanted to believe him, or because I wanted to believe in love, because you should take love in whatever form it is given, right?

The most intimate thing we can do is to allow people we love most see us at our worst. At our lowest. At our weakest. True intimacy happens when nothing is perfect.

One Wake up. Your body will feel heavy with the weight of his leaving, Lift it anyway. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, Let your feet feel the floor beneath you. Remind yourself it is still there. It never left. Make your own coffee, Laugh at yourself when you forget to add the water. Try again. Do it until your coffee tastes like the day you want to have. Be proud that you made it by yourself.

God, when I met you, I was too young ask questions. Dazzled by your brightness, Star peeling away from sky, I thought if I sat on my father’s shoulders– Tiny hands stretching into empty nothing– I would reach you. I would know what you felt like, I swore I knew what you felt like.