maybe

Yeah, I know it’s bad to write with cliches. But they’re cliches for a reason.

“Life is neither as bad nor as good as your heart wants you to believe. Look- even now, you’re orchestrating your own guardian angel.” I flick my cigarette out the window. She’s right. I’ve always considered myself more intelligent than most, but maybe that’s the dead giveaway that I’m fucking not. It’s not that nothing can save me, it’s that I don’t need to be saved- or maybe I don’t believe I need to be saved. What is it really about except for the disparity between what you think should be happening versus what is actually happening?

Anyway, she keeps telling me to quit smoking and it’s for selfish reasons only. She wants me alive, but what does it matter to her? She can see me dead or alive. “It’s not about that.” She exhales, and pinches the bridge of her nose. “You know I’m just saying what you’re thinking, and if you think it’s coming from somewhere outside of you, it’s harder to argue with it.”

I argue with it anyway, because of course I do. It’s hard not to. I always have argued most with those who care the most. Is it a way to test them, to see if they think I’m a worthy adversary? Is it boredom? It’s probably both.

“You always want to sound so compelling, but coming out of your mouth I can’t tell what your motives are.” We both say this at the same time somehow. The dimensions are blurred. I don’t know the specific mechanics of it, but it has to do with loving things so hard that they fragment. Like a dried leaf a child picks up because it’s shaped like a heart, or their face, or a shoe. They hold it so tightly and with such excitement that the leaf starts crumbling, little bits of leaf dust being the only remnants of a fervor so innocent.

We breathe in and split again as she turns the key in the ignition. “You gonna smoke another one?” She asks, knowing the answer before I touch the matchbox. It’s tough. I consider that maybe I love myself too much, enough to lie to myself about how awful, how manipulative of a person I am. I put my hands on my knees, the lit cigarette balancing between the pointer and middle of my left hand. “I don’t know, and I’m so scared of not knowing.”

I look at her and she’s glowing, happy to see me finally admit my fear. But she’s also literally glowing, because she’s the best parts of my psyche mixed with the best parts of the angels I grew up reading about. “Have you decided you don’t want to have kids?”

“I don’t know. I can’t trust anyone with anything, and being a control freak doesn’t make me a good mother. Being scared of everything doesn’t make you safer, it just makes you tired.”

I inhale, praying that this is the drag that changes it all, that there will be a my-life-before-this-smoke and a my-life-after-this-smoke.

But it isn’t, and it’s not, and unfortunately we are on a one-way street in Denton, Texas, and if that’s not a metaphor, I don’t know what the fuck is. Miss your stop on Elm? That’s okay, take a left on Ferguson, take a left on Locust. Take another left on Third, and then you’re back on Elm. Miss it again? That’s fine, go up to the square. Make a bigger loop and hope for the best next time.

“So, do you know what’s gonna happen next?” I ask her. I try not to think of what she’s gonna say, because sometimes she does still surprise me.

“Who does?” exasperation, but also desperation. A complicated retort.

“You sound tired.”

“Mm.”

“Are you?”

“Tired?”

“Yeah,” I say, with a wave of my hand holding the cigarette, because obviously we’re being pedantic and she just wants me to get the fuck on with it.

“A little. Not of this, or of you, because this is what has to happen.”

I nod, like i know what the fuck she’s talking about. This girl talks in riddles, and it almost seems like she’s trying to seem cool, but then I remember that it’s me, and she’s lost but about ten times more hopeful.

“I can’t believe you still wear that necklace,” she says, holding my cigarette.

“I love this necklace,” i say, touching the aforementioned necklace.

“Do you? Or do you think one day it will serve its purpose?”

“Both. Is that a crime?”

She laughs at me, while I touch the carnelian heart that lives on my throat. I bought it years ago because it’s waterproof fake gold and carnelian is supposed to bring love into your life. But honestly, I don’t even know if it’s real carnelian, or if I care. I just know that I’ve always worn a necklace and it’s nice that this one doesn’t turn the back of my neck green.

“Do you still pray?” She asks me.

“Yeah, all the time.”

“To who?”

“Anyone who will listen.” I picture myself on my knees, begging to be heard. The problem with always looking for a sign is that you’re gonna fucking find one.

“Tell me about it.” She rolls her eyes but I can tell she wants to hear me say the real answer.

“Um, I pray to my grandmother I never met. I pray to saint Christopher too-“

“He’s your only experience with saints. You should broaden your horizons. There’s a million saints-“

“You don’t think I know that?”

“I know you like to pretend you have catholic guilt, but you just have regular, old-fashioned girl guilt.” She turns into a parking lot.

“Yeah, but saint Christopher is the patron saint of travelers.”

“Are you?”

“What, a traveler?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe someday. I think I’ve been enough places for now.”

“Has he protected you?”

“As far as I can tell, but who knows what’s actually protecting me?”

She laughs again, echoing my own.

“Like I said, I don’t think you actually know anything. You just expect certain things and you’ve been proven right one too many times. So thus you believe you’re always right. But sometimes, honey, you’re wrong. And I hate to say it, but it’s for the best.”

“You don’t hate that I’m wrong.”

“Of course not-we love to be proven wrong.”

“Focus. Why do you care if I pray?”

“I’m just wondering if you’re still willing to look outside of yourself for answers.”

You watch me scrawl it,

The tip, you want to take care of it.

But honestly, I’m just happy to be here.

For once I’m not hostile

I’m not angry

The me that you reflect

Is loving and kind,

She’s generous

She doesn’t know what’s going to happen next.

The me that I’m pushing is

Cool, and nice,

Not judgmental.

She bites her tongue, thinks of what to say

Before it spills from her mouth.

But truly, what happens:

I love you. I love in the only way she (I) knows how to.

She puts your shoes in a line.

She makes you eat.

She gives into the whims.

Do you need a cigarette?

Take this one.

It’s not the last one, I’ll buy another pack.

Gas stations are marvelous.

Do you need a hug?

I give it. I let you hold her.

She doesn’t know it will make her shatter

As soon as next week.

I was born ready to love.

I was taught that it’s not that easy.

The world is cruel, but

It’s only as cruel as you let it be.

Be honest, I beg.

Be yourself, I beg her.

She doesn’t know.

She is simple. She wants to love.

She wants to watch it reflected,

A happy home,

A determination.

She knows everything.

You can fall in love with anything.

Take your time, listen;

Let it be.

She wants for something that is so hard to find.

She asks, “haven’t I done enough”

It’s not about the deserving.

Anyways, I (she) watches you put down

Six dollars, generous,

Because, truly, you’re

Whenever I was still finding coins in random places,

Like some sort of tithe into the heaven only I was capable of creating.

The tired calls, the wanting,

The desire to be there and be with you.

being friends wasn’t the kind of thing we could do.

It required halfheartedness. Required leeway.

the clouds built up around late February,

Like they do every year. I begged to just be okay.

As if either of us knew what that meant.

There is no us now; only the vacuous space

Created when you took control.

Pretending I was in charge could only last so long.

I wish that we could turn it around.

That I could be the one forgoing penance

In an effort to get into the kind of hell

Only you were capable of creating.

the tired drives. The “it’s not too late”s.

The belief that you can love someone

Into being good.

there’s a reason I lost my earring in your place.

She took it, an offering,

knowing that that wouldn’t be

The last thing I lost.

She took it, knowing that I would press on;

I would try to turn it into some sort of meaning.

an explicable reason for what we were.

Never did I put faith in an archetype

Until you colored in the spaces.

A first son’s anger, an oldest daughter’s forgiveness;

A pressure inside me, relentless

As ever. Every plan getting put off

In favor of your explanation.

A glass of wine, a dying cactus, a meal I taught you, offering knowledge in favor of companionship.

the normal amount. to love

without it consuming you. to love

without burning alive.

how I could casually touch you

without wanting you to destroy me.

I hope it’s raining on your side of town.

it stays humid out here, but

it might help put out the fires.

those habits will kill you, you know.

sometimes we are still

on your couch, your knee getting

closer to mine and me laughing harder

by the second. I think I could live

in that specific purgatory.

anyways imagine not

wanting to take care of you.

imagine ignoring every instinct telling me

to rescue you from what you’re drowning in.

smile at me from the left.

music hasn’t stopped playing

in my head since this started.

it’s louder around you.

I want it to mean something.

to let you reopen wounds

I’d do it for you, you know,

Would lay down and let you destroy me.

I’d let you bite my lower lip,

Two inches away,

Blue eyes into honey brown.

To smell you as I wake up.

I’d let you make my heart race, because

It already does and you already do.

I can’t keep my hands still when

You talk to me, when you

Look at me like that.

But I’ll stay,

Tired, hungry,

Ravenous to feel your fingers

Around my throat.

I’d let you.

I’d let you waste my lighthouse heart,

Let you keep me up for every hour

Because you wanted to see me in the starlight.

Let your ship never come into the harbor safely,

Crash on the exact shore

I was terrified of the entire time.

Believe in magic.

Mom swears that her mother haunts her, and

Promises that I saw her too, when I was little

When I was 10 and saw her in the hospital,

Recovering from anesthesia. She says

“She haunts my childhood home, too.”

I swear I will go to that house

“Where my parakeet is buried in the backyard,”

“Where, honey, you look just like that.”

And I will pick her the flowers her mother planted and bring them back

For penance, for gratitude, as

A reminder that she is loved

And always has been.

My stepfather fell in love with my mom’s magic

And I think my dad did too, and

That’s why I’m here.

She taught me and my sister this magic.

Witches and ghosts and spirits, this

Other side. Voodoo priestess and a third eye.

And we enchant people, even when it doesn’t belong.

“I don’t even understand this...”

“You don’t have to.”

You can try to make me believe that

the spaces between molecules are

nothing but static.

The boy I loved when I was seventeen,

dyeing my hair in his bathroom,

shaking sand out of my shorts on his trampoline,

made my hands shake, baby love,

Nervous. He taught me magic.

Summer in Texas, where the air didn’t move

And we sat on the front porch

Living out some fantasy

That neither of us could describe.

And the way that no weeds grow on my

Mimi’s grave, how my plants never need

water, the way you looked on my balcony

just after my twentieth birthday,

how I held my breath waiting for something that couldn’t happen.

That’s the magic. You asked me if I really

Believed in a separate soul. I believe in yours.

You call me Grace. I never had the guts

to tell you that’s what my parents called me.

I know that you don’t think this way, I know

that I’m just a person to you. Not everyone

can see the spaces between the molecules.

Not everyone gets a story time summer.

I always begin writing again in May.

Just around my grandmother’s birthday.

I feel different this time of year,

Yellow, rebirth, a lark behind my eyes.

In love. With the sunrise I saw this morning

With the trees behind my father’s house,

The home I didn’t love until I left.

I’ve spent the last three years trying to turn something into a home

Into something I want to come back to

Into something I miss.

Build houses out of people and then

abandon them, burn them from the inside out.

My father tells me it’s cleansing.

A nice way to tell me that I scrub people raw

I think they never loved, but only because every time they look at me, their eyes are full of apologies. How are you, I beg. Give me something to work with. A fucking bee sting.

Anyways, I read somewhere that you can’t read in dreams. As if the letters I constantly pen to you, the ones in languages you understand, the ones with shallow words are more than enough. That you can’t read in dreams, but if you try hard enough, you will feel it too. I found it everywhere you couldn’t. 1300 miles away, tucked in the left pocket of an island like a treasure map, with a smile too big to hold all the good that came out of him.

The earth spinning too fast for comfort.

Kissing like curtains in the breeze.

Dry me off, hold me at arm's length

And just enjoy the glow.

Waking up in the sunlight.

Disjointed, pickpocketing my love

As if I wouldn't hand it over

Like fruit, juice dripping

down your chin

As if I didn't want you to pull me.

It wells and crashes

like a wave,

Like every good thing

is happening again.

thinking about time./ cloud cover

was at an all time low for Texas/ summer

came and went and I didn't notice. I took

classes 30 minutes from home and /

pretended a whole bunch /

unfettered by whatever God

had put in my pocket. /

didn't eat on Tuesdays

worked Sundays

cried Wednesdays/

but you / god it's always you.

it's always you / molten gold

is pulsing through the inside of my wrists!

when I fell asleep

alarms stopped working /

clocks had paused

back in May but I still got paychecks /

(A miracle; to bring about religion)

Paid rent/ but the point is

that right after graduation

I quit thinking /

about time and how long

it had been since my jacket

lost the /smell of your bedroom.

And the point is that love like candles/

Can't melt until you light it. That

Saltwater love/ the kind that

only scrubs hearts clean /