personal

Many people are good to me. Many hate me. But there are some out there who know that I’m truly some kind of simple soul caught in a wild gamble. They know me. They know that I sit between these walls. They know I’ve been burned. And that I still laugh.

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Oh, the places you’ll leave! Oh, the reasons you’ll have. A moment of silence for those you will not return for; cannot return for. Oh, the things you will miss. Oh, the friends you will lose. Your childhood bedroom with a window that led out to the roof. The roof you and your friends would smoke pot and read on. The roof Gino Serra jumped off of in 8th grade to prove he wouldn’t die. He didn’t die. The basement that you and your friends dubbed “The Cove” and from then on, you were all cove brethren. The chalk board in the basement used to advertise what Chef’s choice was that night. The buds on the table. The pills between the couch cushions. Bottles, bottles everywhere. Everyone you loved confined in one room. Your bathroom at your parents’ house. The way the air still smells of illness. The way some stains just don’t come out. The way you literally tried to pour yourself out so you would finally be empty. The too-clean square tile where your scale sat for so long. Treatment. Jail bars. Freedom. Sitting at the table for breakfast. Sitting at the table for lunch. Sitting at the table for dinner. Snacks. Sessions. Groups. Feeling watched. Feeling safe. Your first apartment. The red wall. The first time you had sex. The first time you fell in love. The first time in years you fed yourself. The first time you set down the bottle, saying “I’ve had enough.” The first time you went back home. The first time you realized homesick can mean many things.

Monday. She loves you softly, pale lips and pale hands, her eyelashes on your cheek before dawn. There’s tea in bed, too much milk and the perfect amount of sugar. Your hands can’t stop touching her when you say goodbye. The curve of her waist and the soft of her stomach against your body, a palm against your cheek and a fingertip to your lips. Tuesday. Playful, her kisses toothy against your mouth. A smile when she whispers how she loves you as much as she loves peanut butter, lips against your earlobe. She paints eyelashes black, looks up at you through them, dusts powder across her freckles and stains her cheeks pink. She’s all teeth and hands when you say goodbye, a ribbon in her hair. Wednesday. Her side of the bed is cold, early light filtered through the curtains to stain the sheets. When you find her, there are shaky kisses, fumbled hands against your skin. Her fingertips are warm and nervous and her lips are already coloured with coffee stains. She doesn’t say goodbye but the door slams on her departure and you finish the coffee in the pot, hide the cold side of the bed. Thursday. She loves you fiercely, wildly. There are red lips, smudged at the corners and blurred across your cheek. Her teeth scrape your collarbone in that place somewhere between dreams and consciousness. She pulls the blanket with her when she rises it, drops it on the kitchen floor, kisses like maybe you are made of oxygen or peanut butter. Friday. In the morning, before the sun has fully risen, she presses her lips to yours. Neither of you are asleep, but still not quite awake, but her hands reach for you across the distance. You think that it must be love, the way she sets your skin on fire in the late afternoon, burns you from the inside out in the evening. She is a black silk shirt, a gentle touch, wine-painted lips under dimmed lights. Saturday. The brush of her skin against your sides, your face cupped in her hands. Cold palm to your cheek, she brings you to consciousness, fingertips made of fresh roses and sleep. She makes toast spread thick with apricot jam, leftovers from the weekend before. There are crumbs through the sheets and her smile is pink, gentle, smearing jam from the corner of your mouth. Sunday. Warm, she lies beside you until the sun is high. The sheets lose their light, the heat along with it, her body soft against your side. There are whispers against skin, chapped lips and promises, coffee gone cold on the nightstand. Her heartbeat through a cotton nightshirt, beating confessions against her chest, against the palm of your hand pressed to her.

At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon.

That special secret vocabulary and visual language created and spoken by couples when they are together, but discarded and never used again after they break up. I have this image of an archaeologist in the distant future somehow discovering one of these extinct languages and trying to figure out what the words meant.

Let’s borrow life-preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.

When your new girlfriend tells you that she loves you for the first time, you call me first. You say you can’t handle it. You say it’s too soon. You say words like smothered and clingy and I’m digging my teeth into my tongue because you must be the last person to know, aren’t you, you really must be the last fucking person on this earth to have a clue. You demand to know what makes you so lovable. I say empty, meaningless words like nice and funny because the truth is a lump in the throat. The truth is that I want everything that has to do with you, that sometimes that want is another living, breathing organism—a phantom limb of longing. You press harder, croon promises of everlasting friendship into your end of the line and I wonder if you can hear me falling apart at the joints on my end. I don’t know when I’ll finally be able to stop writing poems about you but I imagine it will happen when your new girlfriend tells you that she loves you for a second time and you don’t call anyone. You swallow the heavy. You know you’ll get there eventually, that soon she will be who you call when you want reassurances of love. My face is already starting to blur. You say it back.

You want to travel with them. You want to see what they’re like going through airport security, on planes, in strange countries. You want to meet their families and charm them to pieces. You want to nestle into their childhood beds and look around in the dark at all their old posters. You want to see all the embarrassing photos of them with braces and socks pulled up mid-calf. You want to hear all the stories about their drunken nights under the bleachers and their best friend’s jokes. You want to read all their journals, see how they took notes in high school. Did they use pen or pencil? What color highlighter? You want to work with them, just to see them work. You want to go out with them. You want to make out with them in the bathroom. You always want to touch them; you want them to always want to touch you. You find reasons to disentangle yourself from them; it’s only going to hurt later, you can tell already. You stay up way past your bedtime for them. You look at the clock and know their schedule. You neglect other people and other things, and beat yourself up about it. But it’s like they have a hold of your hands and your voice, and you don’t mind. It’s like you’re trapped in an hourglass; you know your lungs might fill with sand, but there’s something sensual and comforting about the grains sliding down glass walls and pooling around your ankles, your knees, your waist. You like things about their appearance that the rest of the world may cringe at and call strange, less than perfect. Their broken, reshaped noses; their little teeth or the gaps in between them; the way they pull their hair; their narrow hips; their wide shoulders; the depth of their pores. You can laugh when funny things happen in bed. You usually want to be in bed with them. You think they’re smarter, better, friendlier, fitter, happier, more productive than you are. You strive to be as much as they are, as good as they are. You try to cheat and figure out what it is they’re going to teach you, if they’re going to fall from grace, if you’re going to play a part for them that you never thought you’d play before. You try and pull patterns and threads of meaning from the conversation or the way they looked at you the first time you met; what they did, what they offered. An apple stolen from the bar. Notes from a guitar. Pitchers of free beer. Pieces of bark with writing on them. You cherish snippets of them; paste them up in your memories like old faded scrapbooks clutched to chests for generations. Their skin glows black and white in your head. They star in the little short films of your life that sneak up on you when you’re not looking. Like the walk to the South End for dinner on a quiet corner. The feel of the sun beating down on you both at an outdoor concert. The way they ordered wine on your first date. The slow swing of a hammock near a lake. The back seat of their car. You can see yourself with them in the future you can’t quite see. You build apartments outfitted with all the right kitchen supplies and the perfect bed with two nightstands, each piled with books and magazines. You wait for them patiently while they chase their dreams; they wait for you patiently as you chase yours. You sit in bed eating dinner late at night, drinking tea and wine and whiskey as you tell each other all about the chasing. You create adopted dogs and cats; you have awkward conversations about money; you put up with each other’s crap. You see what they look like standing at the end of a candle-lit aisle in your grassy front yard and wonder if you’ll make it to the other end to meet them or if they’ll just end up in the scrapbook clutched to your chest or flickering on the screen in your brain.

Let me tell you some things. I used to investigate child abuse and neglect. I can tell you how to stop the vast majority of abortion in the world. First, make knowledge and access to contraception widely available. Start teaching kids before they hit puberty. Teach them about domestic violence and coercion, and teach them not to coerce and rape. Create a strong, loving community where women and girls feel safe and supported in times of need. Because guess what? They aren’t. You know what happens to babies born under such circumstances? They get hurt, unnecessarily. They get sick, unnecessarily. They get removed from parents who love them but who are unprepared for the burden of a child. Resources? Honey, we try. There aren’t enough resources anywhere. There are waiting lists, and promises, and maybes. If the government itself can’t hook people up, what makes you think an impoverished single mom can handle it? Abolish poverty. Do you have any idea how much childcare costs? Daycare can cost as much or more than monthly rent. They may be inadequately staffed. Getting a private nanny is a nice idea, but they don’t come cheap either. Relatives? Do they own a car? Does the bus run at the right times? Do they have jobs of their own they need to work just to keep the lights on? Are they going to stick around until you get off you convenience store shift at 4 AM? Do they have criminal histories that will make them unsuitable as caregivers when CPS pokes around? You gonna pay for that? Who’s going to pay for that? End rape. I know your type errs on the side of blaming the woman, but I’ve seen little girls who’ve barely gotten their periods pregnant because somebody thought raping preteens was an awesome idea. You want to put a child through that? Or someone with a mental or physical inability for whom pregnancy would be frightening, painful or even life-threatening? I’ve seen nonverbal kids who had their feet sliced up by caregivers for no fucking reason at all, you think sexual abuse doesn’t happen either? You say there’s lots of couples who want to adopt. Kiddo, what they want to adopt are healthy white babies, preferably untainted by the wombs and genetics of women with alcohol or drug dependencies. I’ve seen the kids they don’t want, who almost no one wants. You people focus only on the happy pink babies, the gigglers, the ones who grow and grow with no trouble. Those are not the kids who linger in foster care. Those are certainly not the older kids and teenagers who age out of foster care and then are thrown out in the streets, usually with an array of medical and mental health issues. Are they too old to count? And yeah, I’ve seen the babies, little hand-sized things barely clinging to life. There’s no glory, no wonder there. There is no wonder in a pregnant woman with five dollars to her name, so deep in depression you wonder if she’ll be alive in a week. Therapy costs money. Medicine costs money. Food, clothes, electricity cost money. Government assistance is a pittance; poverty drives women and girls into situations where they are forced to rely on people who abuse them to survive. (I’ve been up in more hospitals than I can count.) In each and every dark pit of desperation, I have never seen a pro-lifer. I ain’t never seen them babysitting, scrubbing floors, bringing over goods, handing mom $50 bucks a month or driving her to the pediatrician. I ain’t never seen them sitting up for hours with an autistic child who screams and rages so his mother can get some sleep while she rests up from working 14-hour days. I don’t see them fixing leaks in rundown houses or playing with a kid while the police prepare to interview her about her sexual abuse. They’re not paying for the funerals of babies and children who died after birth, when they truly do become independent organisms. And the crazy thing is they think they’ve already done their job, because the child was born! Aphids give birth, girl. It’s no miracle. You want to speak for the weak? Get off your high horse and get your hands dirty helping the poor, the isolated, the ill and mentally ill women and mothers and their children who already breathe the dirty air. You are doing nothing, absolutely nothing, for children. You don’t have a flea’s comprehension of injustice. You are not doing shit for life until you get in there and fight that darkness. Until you understand that abortion is salvation in a world like ours. Does that sound too hard? Do you really think suffering post-birth is more permissible, less worthy of outrage? “Pro-life” is simply a philosophy in which the only life worth saving is the one that can be saved by punishing a woman.

dear samantha i’m sorry we have to get a divorce i know that seems like an odd way to start a love letter but let me explain: it’s not you it sure as hell isn’t me it’s just human beings don’t love as well as insects do i love you.. far too much to let what we have be ruined by the failings of our species i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night i know you would never DO anything, you never do but.. i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night did you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes her brain, destroys the receptors that receive pheromones, sensing the change, the male fly does the same. when two flies love each other they do it so hard, they will never love anything else ever again. if either one of them dies before procreation can happen both sets of genetic code are lost forever. now that… is dedication. after Elizabeth and i broke up we spent three days dividing everything we had bought together like if i knew what pots were mine like if i knew which drapes were mine somehow the pain would go away this is not true after two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut down while he still has control over his motor functions he flops onto his back, exposing his soft underbelly up to his lover like a gift she then proceeds to lovingly dice him into tiny cubes spooning every morsel into her mouth she wastes nothing even the exoskeleton goes she does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed them now that.. is selflessness i could never do that for you so i have a new plan i’m gonna leave you now i’m gonna spend the rest of my life committing petty injustices i hope you do the same i will jay walk at every opportunity i will steal things i could easily afford i will be rude to strangers i hope you do the same i hope reincarnation is real i hope our petty crimes are enough to cause us to be reborn as lesser creatures i hope we are reborn as flies so that we can love each other as hard as we were meant to.

Come sleep with me: we won’t make love, love will make us.

Rough sex is the manifestation of romance. You trust someone so much that you let them do whatever they want with one thing that is yours.

It is important to understand where I have come from. It is important to identify the disgusting tar-filled pits I have spent months and months suffering in. It has been beaten into my DNA to feel pain and to doubt. It has been stitched into my head to worry. No single person before you has ever given me such pure and honest time, it feels almost like a dream. When I think of you I imagine myself dancing through fields of tulips and roses; I imagine myself kissing their buds and sipping their sweet nectar. It’s almost like an ocean. It is a city of color and beauty. I hold you so tightly in the shower because I am terrified you will slip away and fall into the drain with the soap and water. I can never feel quite as clean as I want because I know about the horrible things I’ve done to myself in the past.I’ve been so greedy and so ugly. I don’t want you to ever be apart from me. You’ve expanded my imagination and fulfilled my deepest desires. I remember you filling every damn second of my thought and hell I loved it that way. Now? You take up approximately 98% of my thoughts; the other 2% going to how I can make you happier. This small difference feels like miles in my heart. Seeing you for 12 hours feels like torture when I used to see you for 13. You need to understand that this small shift is vast in my being. You need to understand that although my mind has changed, I never strays from some part of you. I love you. I love you so much it fucking hurts when I don’t say it for a certain period of time. I hate washing my hands and face after you leave because its like me pushing the last pieces of you off of me; something I never want to do. I hate washing my sheets because I hate washing the smell of you out of my room. Sometimes I cry in bed simply because I wish you were there to catch them on your chest. This is the only reason. I need constant reminders and constant touch. I was taught to wait for things to come to me, but hell I can’t go 15 minutes without aching for the feeling of you close to me in some way. Nicole, I love you, and I want you to love my through every second of me and my insane thoughts. I want you to be inside my chest and inside my veins and inside my head. I want you to be with me until I can barely remember my own name. I want to be with you until I am coxed six feet under the ground in a dirt suit. Even then I hope I look good enough to make you smile.