middle grey

Writing came secondary to image making but when it got too hot or cold or too much to go outside, writing became similar and cheaper on the nerves.

I bleed more than anyone I know: from my nose for partial days, from other flesh for weeks. If I don’t write that thing swimming through my eyes down, I am afraid I will forget (or worse: forget to remind myself how ENLIGHTENED each day leaves me).

My ex-girlfriend had a shirt that comes from the houses of Jesus, translated into German, the phrase “lighted bodies” across her rice-paper-smooth chest; she had holy text inked to her inner thigh and it felt just like the rest of her thin skin. Her words confused me, her scripture’d body confused me; I write for clarity, clairvoyance, but not as well as I used to. We all have nadirs.

Reading came back this year, mostly through sickness: sickness is a heavy net over the body, but even my quadriplegic uncle can move his eyes; reading became a felicitous activity to pass the dark, awakened hours. 8hours sitting in the hospital: 3hours reading on China’s new backbone of teenage workers in factories; 1hour watching the same half-hour special on venomous spiders playing twice in the hospital waiting room; 2hours meditating; 1 sleeping, crying; and 1 bleeding.

my mother stayed in bed for weeks in the part of my early memory that is now third-person and mostly two-dimensional.

He crawled from his box because (for once, finally) she left open the top; without legs he went, across what has become his world, to the same round petri dish, thousands and thousands of measurements away.

YouTube videos of sad woman androgyny pop, acapella, on loop, what a contemporary way to mourn.

Writing that last break up letter wherein I named myself a hopeless psychopath with a sword and blindfold, and standing naked in my bedroom, facing the street, seeing clearly into everyone’s apartments so I know they can see just as well into mine,

it is all the same.

My favorite neighbors are up, my favorite neighbors are sweeping.

My favorite neighbors are directly across from me and are the woman resting in the corner of her window and facing the sun at the end of our street,

your closed eyes and marble face in the sun and your steaming cup of liquid just beyond your fingers. Here comes your husband, or father, but then he kisses you on the lips and rests his palm and his body’s weight on your thighs, I can see where your soft flesh fits between his fingers. You look much older now.

Every time I fold bags over to be airtight, I wonder how my last fling feels about me. He taught me how to do that; I was obsessed with practicality in relationships, thus made my new standard and marker of success. This man was a man, in his late thirties, with a house, years into his current managerial job, years before that he quit his tenure as a successful banker somewhere in Ohio, all years before I met him at the grocery store and he taught me to fold bags full of flour at square angles.

Read this or not, but I hope you do. I hope it helps.

I was not prepared for our encounter at all today, and that was obvious: when confronted with your pain, I simply reverted to justifying my actions as usual, and by correlation, disregarded your feelings as nonsensical in comparison.

I needed to hear you; I can’t get away with doing things like this. Accountability is something I rarely experience in my life, because I can craft solutions (or illusions) out of sensitive or intense situations with people out of the simple vapor of their very breath. But it was harder with you: you’re incredibly intelligent, observant, perceptive—you noticed something was wrong with me this past winter at the same second I did. That’s never happened before, in any sort of interpersonal relationship of mine.

Privileging other people’s emotions as much as my own reasoning, and working through problems in tandem with another person I trust and respect are two conundrums that I have not yet reconciled—there is no prediction, system, or logic that isn’t wholly opaque, so I opt to avoid them. Both I am guilty of disrespecting gravely between you and me.

So to provide a response to what you wished for today, I am here groping at honesty and up-frontedness with clarity as I much as I possibly can, though with characteristic un-grace and an inability to understand my own misguided self. My actions against you remain an incredible hulking mistake, regret, something that I learned absolutely nothing from except for the depth of my “logical” ineptitude. You needn’t forgive me.

Your life ahead, XXX, may it be void of fumbling people like myself who don’t know how to handle the responsibility of another’s emotions. May you carry on without fear and find partners whom you can love and who will be fully capable of its return.

Love, from Anhedodia,

The sky at night has been absurdly beautiful; the day she left, the moon lit silver outlines in the blackness of the felted water cresting in waves along the edge of the terrestrial bowl formed by the Appalachian mountains,  wherein sits my city. 

The amount of time I spend scripting talks with you is quantitatively greater than any other sum, quite possibly even that of those pink plastic beads you can find in cheap girl shower gel, a product pending legality, because unlike frog eggs and fish eggs and snail eggs, - the potential life-forming particles that these silicon particles are surely meant to replicate-  round, pink, and weightless in that seductively fragrant bottle, they do not dissolve or morph into living things that crawl, sex, and digest their fellows.

Today I was velcro-strapped to a table, force-fed nitroglycerin until I fainted. But don’t worry: the pages of your obituary are safe.

We rescued a yellowy painted turtle, my soul critter, /my spirit animal, I poked its toes: its right foot was not welcomed back in to its mobile home. Handed her, him, off, the small sun-bathed thing, to be placed in the jewelweed, which makes a tincture for poison ivy, see, how it gets when you crush its pieces together? Imagine it drenched in alcohol. Away you walked, scared and cautious I asked: “what is your objective,” “are you sure,” “should I stay here?” When you told me that you love me, I couldn’t breathe and I snapped all my fingers together in departure and I couldn’t meet your eyes; what a shape you’ve left as a hole in my throat. 

What a cruel planet to give me your companionship, just to cast you into the sunshine, and to send me to the eternal grey. 

At least we will tear from each other, separately, and equally; you tear first and set the pace, thank god. I only cry when it seems right.  But more often I want again that stone smooth, stone warm, a surface as familiar as the roundness of my own tongue poised, sitting, sucked to the roof of my own mouth: that is how your rhythm fits into mine.

Middle sister, our mothers are the same age. Sixteen years between you and them, and sixteen annuals between you and me, like the ones you taught me to grow.

Yesterday I was lost in a tomato plant that is setting its vines beyond its cage, along the black succubus dirt; I asked to tie its reaches upward, with ripped cotton strips from your basket, made from your ex-husband’s ex-shirt, in order to best harvest its fruit. I will never see threadbare tie-dye again without imagining it dismembered and better purposed.

For the first time in six years, I did the thing that I told myself that I’d always do: I sat, for the first time since my hair was long enough to get stuck in my armpits from behind, 

I sat down and waited for peace to happen.

I sat and slept, on a ground beneath a porch borrowed for the summer, one extravagant and empty. Jay screams, aimed toward me as I lay prostrate with my shirt off, telling myself that if I believe my bra looks like a swimsuit top, so will the neighbors and their adolescent children, I am free to burn off my tshirt burn line from last week.

Jay screams its pointed avian face at me, but I am not the blonde body tearing apart its relative, rather, it is the cat not named for its sand color, but for the hot drink children love in the winter and which I cannot drink because milk curdles my innards and sugar crashes my brain. (Vinegar blood, bile for my soft tissue; what kind of fucking life is this, I’m jealous of your food.)

Jay screams and its onetime partner lets out the raspy death call from its compromised throat; to my half sleeping senses it is far away. Cat drags the body, jay screams half-blooded scream, I prop myself up and tell myself that the most humane action to take is noninvolvement— the thing is already half-way out of this world. Were I to ‘save’ it, initiated by the impulse of my species, it would bleed out as I watched and felt glad that I spared it a dismembered fate (should I slit its throat myself?).