Sleepless Symphony

I have two daughters, so I’m raising two future women. Maybe! I mean, one of them might be a guy later. It’s possible. It could happen. Someday one of my daughters could be like ‘Dad, I’m really a guy’ and I’ll be like ‘Alright well let’s get you a dick, honey. We’ll get you the nicest dick in town.’

Three years later, a new girl sits cross-legged on your bed. She tastes like a different flavor of bubblegum than you are used to. She opens up a book that you had to read in high school, and a folded picture of us falls out of chapter three. Now there are two unfinished stories resting in her lap. Inevitably, she asks, and you tell her. You say: I dated her a while back. You don’t say: Sometimes, when I’m holding you, I imagine the smell of her vanilla perfume. You say: She was younger than me. You don’t say: The sixteen summers in her bones warmed the eighteen winters my skin had weathered. You say: It’s nothing now. You don’t say: But it was everything then.

She means nothing to him anymore he swears, and his words feel hot as they settle in your hair - “you aren’t her,” he says but when the night settles around you maybe you can taste her tears on his pillow, maybe you can smell her shampoo or the sweet soap she agonized over picking out just so he’d tell her she reminded him of lilacs maybe at first you feel good, good, good, you feel chosen, you feel like you won but her ghost has become as familiar to you as your shadow, you taste her toothpaste and you hear her laughter, he says “she used to paint her nails like you” and you say “yeah?” and go home and don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry because you feel good, good, good god did he just choose you because you wear her dresses and like the same things as she did except you’re more into his tv shows and less into weddings are you just a replacement are you just scar tissue to fill up the wounds she left are you just the girl between the girl he wanted to marry and the girl he actually will and he says “she means nothing to me anymore” and you say “yeah?” and some sad sick part of you knows you should save yourself the trouble of a heartbreak so loud your neighbors would call the cops, thinking they heard gunshots - you’re smart and you’ve seen how these things go and one day he’s going to say “she meant nothing to me, anyway” and he’ll be talking about you because you already mean less to him than you really should but god help you every time he kisses you you feel good, good, good.

This is for the girl who covers her bruises with make-up, coupled with excuses about hitting doors and slippery stairs; “Darling, he won’t ever change. You cannot fix him. Stop trying.” To the girl who cries herself to sleep at night, fist on her mouth, muffling her sobs, the girl who prays to a god she doesn’t believe in with nothing but questions of why, why why; “The answer is not because you deserve this, or that you are never good enough. The answer is because he is nothing but a boy with demons inside of him and no, they won’t ever disappear.” I know you are breaking inside, all bones and darkness and twisted doubt and you think he is the only one who can love you but “Love doesn’t hurt you, nor does it guilt you, ruin you, reduce you into nothing. Love is pure and light and whatever love is, it is not him. It is not him.” I see you, head down and spine crooked and deadened eyes. I see you watch what you say and limit what you do and I see you making excuses for his cruelty because it is your fault and you served his dinner wrong. “You were made to be beautiful; to stand tall with your melting curves and your soft skin. You are a canvas made by a god somewhere and his filthy hands should not paint you black and purple and red and blue.” To the girl with the broken ribs trying to hold a beaten heart; “Leave.”

Do not fall in love with people like me. I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place, so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth. I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave you will finally understand, why storms are named after people.

She does not remind me of anything; / everything reminds me of her.

stars out scars out I’m going to cry.