Why Am I.

the pain is still fresh.

An ache I haven’t felt in years. I laid there for 3 hours, awake, after the fall out. After the screaming and the sobbing and the sickness. I laid awake.

The morning after, my arms crossed, he pours six bottles of scotch down the drain, the 10s and the 12s, begging. “I’m done with this,” he says. And I wanted to say the same, but for different reasons.

The morning after, we arrange to meet her at a park, somewhere calm and quiet that somehow reflects the peace I’ve found with the passing of hours. I know that, even if I were to leave him, I will be okay.

He is so quiet on the car ride there, neither of us willing to look at each other.

We all walk into the woods in the spiritual sense. All of us broken,  all of us wandering.  I want to reach for her hand because I know how it hurts, and how it must hurt in a different way for her.

We are all equal, all of our anguish shared, a little bit more scared and scarred than we all were the day before.  How life can leave a bruise, the color remaining for days, weeks, months, years after.  And I know I have so much to lose, that some would make her an enemy.  But I just can’t, and I don’t want to.  I want to end this ache for the both of us.

There comes a confession, a correlation that had gone unrecognized. We both can barely look at him, but I force myself to face this. The feeling that maybe, just maybe I am dreaming has left me with the stark and starving reality of the three of us, paralyzed.

Her pain is palpable, as I would imagine is my own. I ask him to leave. I just want to hold her. I tell her that I am so sorry, sorry for allowing this to happen. For inviting anything in that could harm her. “This isn’t your fault,” she says. “You have nothing to apologize for.” Instead, I choke back tears and wonder why I feel so fucking guilty.

The afternoon after, I lay in bed and drifted in and out of sleep. I am unconscious for sunset, head swimming with stars as the constellations become visible. I have not eaten in 24 hours. I have no desire to do anything. I have no desire.

When we first met, I remember he held me and asked, “Who hurt you?” Nearly six years later, and I am standing in the door frame, telling him quietly,

I can define my avarice, I can count it while keeping my tongue behind my teeth. Measure its quiet weight inside of my chest, taking up occupancy between the bones like its been there since the beginning. 

I realize now that biology will break you if you allow it. The clench in your stomach, the gritting of teeth. The stirring beneath your skin will surely send you somewhere, make you starve for the sin, leave you wanting. Have you believing the lie- That you can’t live without satisfying this ache. Bridging the gap. Filling in the blanks. 

I.

There is something about the sea that reminds me of you. The icy cold removing the air from my lungs and that dark, dark blue. I look ahead, where I know there should be light, where there should be the moon and her stars, but the sky is on her own tonight. So I bring my knees to my chest and hope that our presence below might be enough to comfort her. 

Enough to have her on our side.

…

The water is lapping the sides of our ship like a dog greeting its master by licking her ankles. I’m already weary of this kindness.

It’s a false pretense, it’s all for show. But how could we know?

II.

The waves rise and slam their fist down upon the deck, and the once friendly lapping becomes a snapping of jaws and the gnashing of teeth. The water grasps at our ankles so we climb higher, looking out across the blue-black landscape that is sure to be the end of this, and of us, as we sink.

…

All is quiet. The sea is calm now; She knows she has us and is satisfied. So we descend quietly into her glass-like surface, holding onto each other in the only way that we know how.

We’ve accepted this. A slow death, like a knife left between two ribs.

III.

Everything is bathed in flame, in that yellow-orange light. How everything once appeared at night before electricity. I stare into the fire and think about coming closer, knowing tonight would not be the first time that I allowed myself to burn.

I received your letter only hours before. It was more like a novel, six years worth of stories and a reference to target practice. Now, I’m no stranger to pain, but lately I’ve been asking myself about what happens if I were to miss the mark instead of you.

IV.

Who would we be if we could shed these skins and build our bones beneath something more than flesh and fire? I am always the burned girl, wearing the kerosene like perfume and summoning the flames at my feet to rise.

I never ask myself if my soul can survive this. Instead, I demand to be singed and smoking, smoldering in the ashes of past lives and present brushes with a new kind of death.

If you were to be the reaper, still, I would not fear you.

V.

The truth is, your letter told me that we would be walking into this wilderness. How we always seem to meet where the road ends or the forest thickens.

Always sifting through the same debris. Always daggers and gasoline.

No sea will ever stifle this. The skies will never side with us. And we will bleed like garnet rings. Our blood flowing as “thick as thieves”.  

30: I dreamt of you last night.

You’re really the only person I ever do dream about.

I heard a bell ringing somewhere and when I opened the door, you were there, wearing the leather motorcycle jacket you wore nearly all winter that year. The one from our old Christmas picture— the one I’ve hidden but keep managing to find by accident just like the ring and the letters.

Just like you. I can hide you, drown you deep inside of myself, I can lock you up, and I can even trick myself into hating you. But all of me— id, ego and super— always seem to toss you a life preserver or a key. And I know it’s because they all still want you here. And, to some extent, so do I.

I opened the door and there you were, eyes always embers, half-crooked smile ready, bags packed and over your shoulder like some homeless rock star. And you just said my name. Mine. “Jorrrdaan”, caramel-smooth, the same way you said it back to me the night we met at the Green Door— the same way you said it every time we climbed into bed, when you introduced me to your friends, or when you took me across state lines just to say my name in that exact way to relatives we both thought would someday be mine too.

You dropped the bags at my feet and said, “I came home”. Just like that, as if anything ever was or would ever be that simple for us. You move forward, and while my instinct is to throw my arms around you, because I know you won’t stay, because I know this is a dream, I turn away. You beg, hands on my hips and breath on my neck. I’ve never known warmth such as yours.

I deny you in my dreams in the same way that I’ve denied you since you last attempted to destroy me. Attempted. You should have known that it would take a lot more than sleeping with someone else to destroy me. And I kept my word. I said I’d never touch you after that day, and I haven’t. But sometimes my dreams betray me.

They make up big words for that kind of love- ambition, diligence, precision. He’ll stop at nothing to swoop in with another synonym for success and leave you hen-pecked, bruised like rotten fruit.

He’ll steal the stars that circle your head if you let him. He’ll wait until there is nothing left, and then he’ll take you in his arms, wings weeping and wilted from the good old days of acid rain and tooth decay, days when the sweetness came with a bite that made him believe everyone should suffer. Including you, the one he chose to believe in and now hopes to bury.

He made you a Queen when he asked you to join his kingdom, but his throne is built on corpses and his princely tongue coated in poison. They never fell for him, you realize. They just fell beneath him, and you can see it now.

But you were so eager to be good, so willing to be loved, so quick to buy into his brand of belief, selling yourself short of skepticism for a crown you could never carry. No price is worth this punishment, no scepter is worth your soul. This is a purgatory he calls penance, and for what, little Queen? What have you done to deserve such disgrace, but to delve into the deep end, accepting his offering with your whole heart?

You wanted to have something to hold, to see the heavens from his heights. But you’d trade the heavens for a halo, your crown for a conscience, even if it meant breaking every bone on the way down.

You can fall away from him without falling beneath him. He may clip your wings but he cannot contain your wild and wizened heart, he cannot suffocate your sense of worth. You will be a garden blooming on the ground, far from his reach, brought from a seed that was not afraid to be buried to be born again.

(I could have never known then, how much I would need that title.)

This is the first time that I have ever stood face-to-face with imminent death. This will be the first time that I experience the grief of losing a family member as an adult. 

I am usually left comfortably numb by death. I don’t seem to handle it well. It is so hard for me to acknowledge the reality, to acknowledge the after so separately from the before.

We lost my mom’s father when I was five. I don’t remember much, except wanting to be alone. I shut myself inside my closet with all of my stuffed animals and buried my face in one of them to cry. My mom opened the closet door with tears in her eyes and sat on the floor. She got down on my level to speak with me, her eldest daughter. Her progeny. A member of a new generation she brought into this world so that our family would continue, even after deaths like the one we were experiencing. Together. 

I will never forget this.

When I was twenty-one, my now husband lost his close friend and cousin to an overdose. It was misery to see him so fragile and exposed, ripped open, family torn apart. I hung back during the wake, head bowed, my hands folded into each other, focusing on my breathing while the air in the room thickened with grief. I could not go to the coffin. I did not want to know what reaper looked like. I did not want to face what death had done. 

When his mother entered the room, knees weak and wailing at the loss of her son, I wanted to run. I dug my nails into my palms and closed my eyes, feeling so totally the weight of my inability to do anything. Powerless, I watched his parents shuffle forward into the room, a procession of despair, of wreckage and ruin. Powerless, I watched the man I loved weep over an open coffin. There was nothing I could do. 

The worst has always been watching my father cry. We lost two of his favorite uncles in quick succession, a few years after the other. It was the first time I ever saw him relinquish control, lay down his crown, and weep. I wept too.

My father’s father is dying, and has been dying for some time. But now, it is undeniable. It is a fact. Death come calling. Death come running. Death come to claim what it always does. 

The key to this and you and everything The vulnerability of the human being

It has been said,

“How strange it is to love something that death can touch”.

But I think it is stranger still to have touched someone who has actually loved death.

I wonder sometimes… If your hands around my neck was the mere practice