#strangelings

“and so I held it, without reviewing it, I held it perfectly still.”

[May 2010  i know the house you grew up in isn’t far from here. i don’t go there because i know it’s filled with ghosts. i write about you a lot and you don’t even know it. it’s hard sometimes to say things i know you’ll never hear. ] rosewater, skin, cracked sidewalks. poems about the flocking pattern of birds. poems about being roof top sad in false sunsets. about both the presence and absence of childhood and all of the ways I am trying to protect it. here’s the hem of our noise. we spill some bad weed into the carpets of your childhood bedroom. we sleep huddled together in that twin bed. we’re trying to keep out nightmares about your dead father, your mother’s yelling, the shit that happened to us in the years before knuckling its way through. this is cul-de-sacs and sweat. this is sloppy handstands in yards that weren’t ours. dandelions floating in firecracker heat. the sun is always behind you so that in all of my recollections I’m always squinting at you. your energy has a pressure, this sodium lamp all glittery with intensity. this is all without any kind of grace. it’s adolescent and incendiary. this is what we like about it and this is what we hate about it. I call you keeper. I call you many things. what do you call me? 

we steal your grandmother’s car and when the moon bobs in the rearview mirror my heart clenches each time it dips out of view, but I don’t know why. it beats fast when I remember too much, like this, always like this. 

(childhood bedrooms thick with gloom and daydreams and fits of crushing honesty, quiet blue driveways lined with azaleas, every flower gilded and electric in slow blooms of light, viciously magenta. did you know magenta doesn't have a wavelength? it doesn't exist on the visible spectrum. just an interpretation, a composition; our brain bridges the gap. it’s us waking up in too warm dens after parties we’d only ever go to together and always covered in someone else’s glitter, feeling almost pretty inside bedrooms that weren’t ours, sleeping until late afternoon, sun sticky. school bells, notes in milky pastels, gestures confused with different kinds of devotion. we break curfew and you break my heart, smashed glass, I forgive you and forgive you, toss and turn in each others shadows. it’s when I saw you out on the mezzanine right before the last time.)

the bolt retracts and suddenly i want to omit so much, i want to admit nothing. i want to quit crashing against the barricades of my own love. i didn’t know that was true until i said it.

the ending is simple, really. we make at least three different plans to run away and then cheat our way out of each. the last thing we do together is watch a sunrise on your roof and smoke your moms shitty cigarettes. our youth capsizes there. I feel hardened and I feel indignant, it’s so stupid; I just wasn’t ready. can you still see it too? girlhood coming to its strange close on that roof where we sit with our hips touching like a barricade, the summer is disintegrating there too so that the sparkly, interesting mist of it is all I’ll have left. I stopped writing about it when I stopped feeling sad about your memory. about the memory of who I was alongside you. maybe I should have crafted something in the wake of forgiveness. Finality was the last thing I ever wanted. And what other name is there for when whatever I had picketed to you eventually takes strange and softer shapes? I could see twinges of it even before it was happening. like heat shimmer or hunger pangs. a goodbye always felt something like collusion, something like betrayal, and so that’s how i told it. even now, I try and carve my way through but the truth is fractal, an empty house echo. What really happened and what it felt like are almost never two perfectly congruent things.

this is probably why the most recognized piece of writing I’ve ever shared was about you. people still write me about it, they think it’s about some romance I was a participant in once. I wonder what you’d think of that. if I could construct a new memory forged influx, you would throw your head back and laugh. you would say “how could you think it’s not?” and I would reconsider. I would think that this is true, maybe. that something about girlhood in and of itself is dark and hungry and whatever iridescence lives there can’t help being turbulent. I don’t know if this is romantic, though. the problem is that people forget all it takes to make something holy is thinking about it hard enough. 

enough about the loudness. here’s the silence: comfort is just the curve of a neck. a back seat always felt like such a personal place to be in with another person. the smell of bleach makes me think of you; cold water rushing in a bone white bathtub. I sink my hands into the froth like I am made for that kind of thing. later that night your mom’s boyfriend will say something rude about your hair and you’ll smile in a way that softens your eyes when you say fuck you across the dinner table. nobody says anything about how the years eventually stop moving in technicolor and teeth. You start to think it never really was like that–but it was. it just felt good to forget.

I am small, unfolded in the sunlight. We’re holding hands so that it feels like this: cool cotton; blue watercolored; flowers and sun flush. I am still small but now it’s many years later. You sit with me silently on your back porch. I took polaroid photographs of your hands on this porch. Now we watch stars: unlocking, unwinking. fireflies with their lights trailing in echoes. I have just graduated. I feel sad that I have none of my friends with me to celebrate. I forget, only momentarily, that you are my first friend. that feels like this: indigo and creeks, swelling chaotic, a backyard coated in moonlight, contralto.

These memories are ornate. I have many of their kind. Everything else is silhouettes. The older I get the more they scald with affection. Does everyone know this kind of power? I don’t know where to begin. I’m crying in the closet. I am either 16 or 22.  I pray to your God who is now my God; I want to beg for gentleness, I want to show my palms upturned and say this was all I could take. Please, let this be the ceiling. I don’t say this. I make fists. I say I would like to shock myself with the kind of weight I can carry. I would like to take an acre of thunderstorms and carve myself from them like forgiveness. I’m saying the words but I’m using your voice to do it. I can do this because your voice was once the only channel I had. sometimes this is a practice in connection, other times it’s a relapse into reflexes. both are good. a kind of protection?  it all glows gently.

[October 2009 in the soft dark of July I waited with my hands fumbling in my pockets. it was five in morning and i was working up the courage to tell you i was going. i shook on the sidewalk, maybe from the cheap beer, but maybe from the way you and your brothers all have the same eyes. ] The year is 2007. There’s a carnival in late summer so everything’s deep red, soft blue, cotton candy pink. Soft serve ice cream drips down our fingers as we stumble in gravel and flamelight. It’s only one night but some things have a funny way of coloring a whole season. I've called that both magic and forgery. I’m the kind to dwell on how almost nothing is ever one-sided. you, calling me only “girl” you, saying “you know you’ll never choose this though, right?”

It starts with you smiling at me from your old pick up truck. It ends with me smoking your cheap soft-pack cigarettes in the bed of it. I write something in my journal that month about girls with violent eyelashes and you telling me stories of Achilles regretting everything. I write something about the places I used to be afraid of being in with you. I write about the things that can grow in the dark full of their own forest of power and how when you try to cut them down the kickback is exalting, makes you almost feel real.

me, sitting in the nook where your cabinets meet in a corner. It’s somewhere between night and morning, somewhere in the messiest hours of being a person. You reach over me to turn up the radio, unfamiliar with the gnarled bravery I could summon out of nothing. I’m an atlas of crushing want that is almost always inexact. I’m hungry for any failure as long as its glitter is interesting. I never remember anything as truthfully as I feel compelled to.

[ November 2008. I’m sorry about the rain on the window panes and the notes and all the vodka and the time we saw the play and I cried in the theater and wouldn’t tell you why. ]

I was in a shitty motel in Los Angelos some six years ago--the sun having just barely risen, the door cracked opened only by a glass bottle, my feet dangling off the rusty balcony--when I heard your voice for the last time. We joked about nothing, talked about visiting while I was in town. Then you told me it was hard to not be friends. You said it casually the way you ever told me anything. It felt sad and good to hear you say and also like a summation. I said nothing because there was nothing I could say. It was a fact we were always trying to cheat. I held it with the hands that helped build it and knew this was all it would be. I never did visit you.

the color orange

you’re throwing fries at me at a neighborhood burger stand. your friends are laughing, my friends are laughing. it felt like holding hands. / a park swing beneath a giant golden rain tree where a small kiss is filched in the daylight.

Bright orange butterflies dive to their soft, tiny deaths in our faces when we climb the stone steps to the bay front. We catch them in our hands. we laugh into the many bodies of them. Waves of orange flutter against us and my heart is a rope swing. my heart is a grade school parade. I take this as the wrong sign, as a new beginning. But time is jagged, snakes through ditches I’m not ready for. it continues without any kind of tenderness. I was still shoveling any faith I had left into it. I called this courage once. I made it something cruel.

A sticky ugly orange gas station booth where we try to finally leave.  we don’t know how to do it right, we’re afraid to be anything else. There was a staggering resonance in the chord of that ache and I used to be so angry about the way we made it all worse. If we were foolish about how to face the way our lives had suddenly forked, it was just because we were devoted to the people we had been to each other. There’s still a lot of goodness in that. I’m glad I learned tenderness before I learned ruthlessness. I think its made me better at both.  

the color blue

You quit the football team but don’t tell your parents. we keep going to the games to make out near the old tennis courts. / My back on the soft dirt, sighing in chorus with the cornfields. You say something about this part of Texas always smelling like cinnamon. You say something about the way sometimes my eyes look blue.

I am at the foot of your stairs, in a beautiful blue skirt my mother bought me for Christmas, squinting at the cracks in your ceiling. I write about this in many poems--always too pretty, too soft. Where are the fucking teeth? There’s nothing lovely about what I am doing there. I am collapsing parts of myself to keep making room for you. dissolving.  In your eyes later, marbled and strange with darkness, I will feel like a parable. And the truth is that it still wasn’t good enough. This is the coda. This is what our last verse really looks like.

the color violet