Ex Animo

December 24th and we’re through again. This time for good I know because I didn’t throw you out — and anyway we waved. No shoes. No angry doors. We folded clothes and went our separate ways. You left behind that flannel shirt of yours I liked but remembered to take your toothbrush. Where are you tonight? Richard, it’s Christmas Ever again and old ghost come back home. I’m sitting by the Christmas tree wondering where did we go wrong. Okay, we didn’t work, and all memories to tell you the truth aren’t good. But sometimes there were good times. Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep beside me and never dreamed afraid. There should be stars for great wars like ours. There ought to be awards and plenty of champagne for the survivors. After all the years of degradations, the several holidays of failure, there should be something to commemorate the pain. Someday we’ll forget that great Brazil disaster. Till then, Richard, I wish you well. I wish you love affairs and plenty of hot water, and women kinder than I treated you. I forget the reason, but I loved you once, remember? Maybe in this season, drunk and sentimental, I’m willing to admit a part of me, crazed and kamikaze, ripe for anarchy, loves still

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven. Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three. Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is. You don’t feel eleven. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes even months before you say Eleven when they ask you. And you don’t feel smart eleven, not until you’re almost twelve. That’s the way it is.

You’ll find someone who’s brave enough to love you. Some day. One day. Not today.

“Your girlfriend stabbed me in the back with lefty scissors.”