MY SHRINK CALLS ME SWEET PEA

Hetero Humor™

I know I am home when the highway opens up like a mother’s loving arms. (When your mother held you, you learned that some things open just to close. You were three years old.) Here the deer die young. We pull them out from beneath blue family SUV’s. And sixteen year old girls contemplate death above the waterways. (You did this once on a Thursday night. Golden lights from the ships winked at you, telling you to stay.) In this town, God forgives you. But you can’t forgive yourself. Yet, you try to kiss her anyway and realize that she tastes nothing like hell. And this is where the headlights of my heart found her, in the backyard of my home. Where I learned to walk, to run. Where I buried my first dog. (The grass grew more fervently there. But you never ever went near it.)
So you were right. Love is not the answer. But god, did it keep me alive. In a town where people root into the dirt like oaks. Where the deepest secrets can only be seen from the tops of steeples. Where two teenage girls (bound by the hair ties on their wrists) tried not to die young, like the daughters that came before them, or like fawns crossing roads in the rear of night.