#lonepinepoetry

sometimes i believe that love is coming for me eventually. that it's just waiting until i finish becoming myself. other times, i am certain i was made to be alone forever, that i will never witness the kind of love i have always ached for.

sometimes i think i am meant to bleed out in the snow. no warmth, no hands, no reason. just white silence and the body giving up. i tell myself i have to be okay with it either way. i try not to linger on what i can’t control.

so here i am, i guess. letting go. not abandoning the idea of love; just handing it back to the universe like something too heavy to keep holding. maybe i will be loved someday. maybe i will die alone. i think i have reached the point in my life where both feel survivable.

as if i am even ready for love at all. maybe the universe knows that. maybe that's why everything feels so still. i wouldn't know how to hold the very thing i ache for in my own shaking hands.

that's the devastating part: not that i don't have it, but that i might someday. that it could be real. because if it is, it only confirms the universe's cruelty: that i spent two decades consecrating my loneliness, making peace with the idea that i was meant to be alone forever, carrying the eternal wound of a mother and the voices that taught me this was my destiny. and it is only now (if ever) that i am deserving?

i don't know how to forgive the time it took to arrive here.

I'm scared the next time I have sex I'll end up crying again, which already feels like a prophecy and not a fear, because the last time, I did.

The last time I did and I tried to hide it, like maybe if I kept my face turned just enough, I could pass it off as breathlessness or pleasure or some other lie polite enough to swallow. As if I could act my way through devastation and call it intimacy after. As if wanting to be held and wanting to disappear are not the same muscle.

The first time I had sex as me was supposed to be merciful and resurrecting. The first time as Jonah. The first time after dragging myself out of the graveyard of formaldehyde and rot. Like maybe I would stay in my body this time.

For most of my adult life, I believed I was asexual. I held onto that like a verdict, clean and final. It was easier than saying I had built an entire life out of flinching, easier than saying desire has only ever seemed like dread, easier than saying I was afraid.

Easier than saying that other people kept arriving at me like hunger without reverence, access without witness, like the body is the body is the body and what does it matter what name it answers to when it opens.

But I get off just fine on my own. Better than anyone else has managed. Better than anyone who liked my endurance more than the unbearable act of meeting me as sacrament. Which may be its own indictment.

I can, in solitude, arrive. But the second another person enters the room, everything becomes performance. Everything becomes me watching myself from somewhere up near the ceiling like God has abandoned the body and taken more interest in the stability of a light fixture dark enough to be a co-conspirator.

I know how to come undone on my own. What I don't know is how to stay inside myself when somebody else wants something from me.

The first time at fifteen was a trial I was convicted in before I even knew the charges. That's how it lives in me: a sentencing. As punishment I am still serving for the crime of wanting to be chosen. I thought if I could endure it, I could be loved.

I bled out for three days straight. Long enough to feel something leave me. Not just blood, but whatever part of me still believed my body could be holy. Long enough for it to stop feeling incidental and start feeling biblical. I bled until it felt like every cell that had once held innocence had drained out of me and sunk into the dirt.

It all went into the dirt. That's how I remember it. Nothing has grown there since. A fault line formed instead. Person after person mistakes rupture for invitation. How much deeper can I get? How wide can you open for me?

They think they are entering me. They think this is an opening. As if depth means consent.

I am not opening. I am splitting. I am not opening. I am re-breaking along the oldest line. I am not opening. This is tectonic. This is disaster.

I am more ravine than man. I am a geography formed by pressure, and then blamed for crumbling in the hands of those attempting sincerity.

I've made love more to ceilings than bodies. To plaster. To shadow. To hairline cracks. I know the grain of absence better than I know devotion. I know how to put my soul in the architecture and leave the body to collapse.

I know how to fake coming undone while silently praying for death, or at least for erasure, or at least for the hour to move faster. Death means I was a person. Erasure means I was never here at all.

Please let this end. Please don't let me cry. Please don't notice I left. Please let me come back before it's over.

You could call me a real man. You could mean it.

But I would still have to hide my chest. Still have to map your hands away from me. I would still have to negotiate the room. Still have to offer you the fault line and hope it doesn't shift while you're inside it.

I would still have to think ahead to angles, lighting, timing, where your hands might wander, what I might have to redirect, what part of myself I will need to remove so that I can survive being wanted. I still have to hope you don't mistake the tremor for welcome.

But by the time you arrive, there is no arriving left in me. Sometimes wishing to be held gently is no different from feeling yourself vanishing.

Bodies are archivists. Mine has kept everything.

I shove heat into my lower spine as if I don’t translate to grief poetry at the concept of someone sharing a bed with me. I only pray to God when I fear demons; his eyes are gentle enough to bring me to my knees.

The rot inside my stomach is making the room sick. There should have been enough formaldehyde to last me another year, or maybe five if I clenched my jaw hard enough. I’m not roadkill anymore; they still mistake my preservation for mutiny.

My hands aren’t burning anymore. The smoke alarm in my mouth keeps chirping. Still here. Still here. Still here. The porch light is a forest fire, and I mistake the light for heaven. If I inhale and choke, does that mean my parents love me?

The afterlife leaks out into the grass and begs to be seen; I’ve been haunting people who don’t believe in me. I had prayed for an ending with heat in it, then act surprised when my hands leave and leave and leave.

I had to check the floor to make sure I wasn’t bleeding out when he started talking. I don’t know what he sees if not emergency.