Tag: words

These days, I live somewhere on the pendulum, swinging back and forth between wanting to leave and wanting to believe.

And on the long strokes between here and there, I think about how he said he’d die for me. How he said he’d do anything. How he came to me, begging for solutions with his open palms. But when I offered them, he withdrew the request. Called them ultimatums. Said I was controlling.

Believe. Swing. Leave.

So I get angry, think about how what I have and what I deserve are two different things. Think about how I am married to a liar, a coward, a man who has so many fatal flaws but refuses to acknowledge a single one until he’s cornered and compromised. Until I’ve dug it out of him because he doesn’t have the strength to do it himself. Instead he laughs and says it isn’t a big deal. (Nothing is ever a big deal). Says that I’m punishing him. Says that things are better now. Different now.

Leave. Swing. Believe.

And I wish it was. I wish I could forget all of this. Go back to the way things were, before I remembered that he’s as weak and wily as he always has been. That I somehow forgot. That I somehow allowed myself to forget. That I could fall prey to his charm. The bullshit he feeds even himself. Even though I should know better. Even though I do.

Believe. Swing. Leave.

It’s been a year without answers. I’m still excavating every memory, the event bookended by the before and after. There is nothing else for me. She is a viper, he plays the victim, but they’re both poison. They’d rather me write this off without question rather than seek to understand the extent of my wounds. Fumbling for the antidote even while being told by everyone that maybe there is no cure.

Leave. Swing. Be—…

For one blissful moment, I forgot her name.

What it felt like to speak it, or to know others like her.

I am sitting across from a woman I love who shares your name, telling her about you. It is your name, but it is not your name. For a moment, one brief moment, you are so meaningless to me that I might forget what to call you by. Then the name returned, and I marveled at the fact that I could forget you at all.

Today, you came back.

If you can call it that.

Because that is what you are known for– the leaving. The coming and the going. Freely, as I suppose you should. And perhaps you have no idea. Perhaps the Saint genuinely believes he’s doing what is best for everybody. Paying it forward. Counting the rosary beads. Living in the light. And then there is me, the Sinner, the Harlot, the Herald, falling at his feet. A prisoner for all of my wanting.

You should know, when you go there is always a piece of me that wishes she could follow. That I could blindly let you lead. Anchored by the disappointed and disillusioned heart of a 19-year-old girl that fell for you and held on for dear life. Through houses, haunted and hopeful, through a marriage both serene and in shambles, through death and dismemberment, embellishments and accidents. All of this.

All of this.

I was drinking Chianti the night that it happened.

For a while after, I couldn’t see a bottle without the acid taste filling my mouth, my lungs threatening to collapse and send me spiraling. The feeling of suffocation as I stumbled into the kitchen, their hands still intertwined.

We had to sell the couch. Because I couldn’t be there- Where it happened. I wanted every remnant of the occurrence out of my house and stricken from our existences.

The morning after, that included him. I wanted him gone. I wanted to be alone with it, with the realization that my life might be a lie, that the security I had found in this house was in shambles. What was it she said? “You can’t make homes out of human beings.” I should have known better. And I did. But I wanted to believe that maybe we were different or better than the fucked up generation we belong to. But we’re not. And maybe we’ll never be. Maybe that’s us, doomed.

My anger keeps me sharp. Sometimes I feel like it’s all I have left in all of this. I am a fire burning, trying to make the memories into cinders, trying to turn everything that opposes me to ash. Sometimes I think I could take this whole house with me in my rage. But instead I turn on the water, let it run over my smoldering skin, my fingertips aflame, wash the smoke from my hair and remind myself that it’s temporary.

Temporary. Like everything else.

You led a tribe, and for a moment, I was part of them.

Arms encircle me, a welcome I wouldn’t soon forget. Something that felt like family, like foundation, an explanation to the unknown.

…

I haven’t heard from you in weeks.

I remove myself, attend parties. Meet other beautiful men who remind me of you, but they are not. After a night of dancing and of drinks, I retreat upstairs to be alone, past the parlour and into the ladies room to lay my forehead against the cold marble of the sink. My dress– long, black, and glittering, shifts with the slightest sign of movement. There is a presence beside me, a ghost perhaps, but with my head laid out onto the counter I refuse to believe that it is anything but a misplaced hallucination. I close my eyes, lift my face to the mirror to see yours beside me. A hand at the small of my back to guide me again to that hell from which I came. I feel faint. “No,” I say. His eyes seek to impale me to the spot, to immobilize. A hypnotist. A Houdini.

Turning me around gently, he says, “I’ve returned. How I missed you.” He kisses my face, smelling of cologne and incense, seeking to be irresistible.

He is.

Acid rises in my throat. I want to spit on him, to tell him he is the lord of lies, but my head swims as I shake it, no. No, I will not go with you. No, I will not return to your side. No, never again. Never. He kisses my face, tucking a hair behind my ear as he turns me towards the mirror. His initials appear, tattooed into the curve of my nose, under my right eye. Unavoidable, impossible to hide. A claim.

He kisses my neck, runs his hands through my hair as tears fall. He is whispering in my ears how he loves me, how he wants me, how he is here now. Here for now. The mark on my skin is enough. I sober up, expelling this intoxication, raise my arms between us. “No,” I say again. I push him backwards. “No”. I can’t seem to form other words, to tell him how he has hurt me, how he has been merciless, cruel, unkind. How he has deceived, demeaned me with his absence, his abandonment.

He can’t hide the surprise in his eyes. He rushes towards me again, and with my arms extended I say no, again, louder. When he comes into contact with my touch, I push him.

Say it again. Say it until he believes it. Say it until you believe it.

He grows angry at my resistance, my unwillingness to comply as I always have. Forgive as I always have. “No”. I shout it this time, back away from him, towards the door. I want to leave. I want to leave as he has left.

My hands search for the doorknob, but instead find a gun. Its weight heavy and compact in my hands. And this time, when he rushes towards me, I believe he means to hurt me. To take me by force. No. I scream. I raise the gun.

I fire.

Shocked, he flies backwards, away from me. So far that I can’t see him, can’t feel his presence. He is here, but he is not here. I feel nothing. I can breathe. The door behind me opens, and I fall through it as the room turns, floor lifting from my feet.

I land on a wooden stairwell, gun in hand, as his tribe emerges. Ready to avenge their Prince, their ruler, the royal. A crown I rejected years ago, before I had a chance to become loyal to it. They advance, weapons raised, at the ready. So willing to strike down the woman who loved him, a woman who could have been their Queen, if only she could keep him. If only he would have stayed.

Do they know that her loyalty would have remained? Can they fathom what has occurred in dreams, in silence, in secrets exchanged without saying anything at all? Do they understand their Phantom Prince, my Phantom Limb, my unobserved weakness?

“No”. Say it again until they believe it.

Say it again until you believe it.

Little Yellow Pills

She hands over little yellow pills, tells me they’ll take the edge off. I nod and smile, everything a string of reflexes and muscle memory. Faking it is less painful than being vulnerable these days, so I let them slip between my fingers. For a moment I lose myself in the motion, lose myself in the fantasy. Wonder how far off the edge I can go, wonder how many it might take to cure the sadness. Wonder if I am curable at all. Try to forget about him, forget about her. Marvel at how I’ve held myself together with gritted teeth while my organs spill into my own open hands.

I try to be polite, smile and say thank you, as if I’d ever be brave enough to give this a go, as if I could actually let someone who isn’t me tell me what is best, Oh No. This self-righteous form of self-help who refuses to admit weakness, only ever using words that equate to fine. Staying busy and pushing everyone away. Throwing money at the problem while holding it closer to my chest.

I don’t tell her that I have my own methods of coping; We’re always on a need-to-know basis. Poured like blood into a glass. Something akin to falling down the stairs, like falling asleep but wanting to neglect the nightmare. The next day bruises. The shaking of heads. The reopening of a wound you have tried one thousand times on your own to stitch up, but still won’t accept help. Even if it means bleeding to death on the living room floor.

The intimacy of something you want to be real, so you continue reaching, never extending your arms out to anything. Coping becomes copacetic becomes pathetic becomes pragmatic.

And all of this to say- If I wanted pity, I would just state so. If I want peace, I’ll have to try harder. Hand over my weapons. Confess my crimes. Surrender in ways other than sadism. Stop holding myself hostage. Lay down all of my laws and trade them like currency for a future I can actually afford.

 

The morning after, 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, even 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,

“This time, it was you.”

At Eighteen, love was a party; Ornamental and under the influence.

Any drunken chance encounter could result in a future. And though that’s what he was searching for, that night, he made the mistake of locking eyes with me.

I was a sorry sort of girl. A no-future-Neverland-nymph who just wanted to be loved, but didn’t care for the commitment of returning the favor. If you were chasing me, you’d be running for a long time.

And he almost had me.

We sat on the living room floor in a circle of people I was embarrassed to call friends in a city I was surely learning to loathe, and he reached out and tucked my hair behind my ear. It was the sort of gentleness you don’t encounter too often, especially as a reckless teenage girl, and it shook me. I looked at him with these Could you be… kind of eyes, and everything about him seemed to whisper back wordlessly, Yes.

It’s funny what seems like fate when you’re a few drinks too far gone.

I took him home, and we set my room on fire, sparked by the friction of his skin on mine. Black ink outlines traced his chest, and I marveled at them as my fingertips and lips explored his form. He was shy, and I was unabashed, wanting to crack the surface in favor of the core, the candid, the carnal. Devour him like crème brûlée. Make him come alive.

By the time I was done, his nervous whispers had become a fevered growl. 

He stayed unexpectedly. A series of months where we wrote love songs on my walls, read in bed with legs intertwined. Fucked to Girl Talk until I couldn’t walk.

Fucked until I couldn’t feel anything.

I fell out of love with him because he was too kind. Sickly sweet, like a toothache. And when you’re young, kindness can be crippling. Sweetness can suffocate. You learn so little from ease. And I wanted to be a scholar. I wanted my PhD in love and loving, and I was willing to pay a price. After all, what is experience without exsanguination? Because if you’re not willing to bleed for it, hearing him say “I would die for you” suddenly turns into slavery. And I fancy being the one in cuffs, not the other way around.

On my own terms, of course.

He filled my bathtub with balloons, tore pages out of dictionaries with the words that reminded him the most of me. He wrote me poems on the backs of postcards picturing cities that neither of us had ever visited, but ones that I hoped to someday. He littered the city with my likeness, unapologetic artworks in obsidian aerosol. When I finally told him I wanted to be alone, they were blacked out the next day. And two days later in Tulsa, I was kissing a stranger with metal in his mouth under the cover of night and neon lights.

We all have our own ways of dealing with things. 

When I left for London, I did it without him. I moved out of the apartment we attempted to burn to the ground without a backward glance. I threw the poems and the postcards away. I wasn’t primed for being present for that kind of history, so I cut him off completely. Tried to close his chest like open heart surgery. Did my best not to leave too pronounced of a scar. Careful and calculated, but not kind.

Professional, but not personal. 

On certain occasions we were forced together by mutual friendships. Our embraces were meaningless and mechanic, our intermittent acquaintance awkward at best. But sometimes I would catch him looking at me from across the room, and I would instinctively tuck my hair behind my ear and wonder if he noticed the association, or if we were still just two people, sitting in the presence of mixed company, trying to define something that would never be definitive.

 

I still remember the weight of you, drawing me heavy and low.

Delicious and dream-like, hollowing out my belly and winding through every vein, all of the sinews of muscle that drew tight at the thought of you. Nerve endings that had forgotten how to fire suddenly knew feeling, knew longing. Knew nothing else. How you took root somewhere inside of me, nestled into blood and bone as if you had been there since birth.

My Gemini. My twin, my brother.

My lover.

It is a profound discovery, the drive to delve so deeply without the desire for delicacy, to nurse the nagging thoughts of endless possibility without the fear of anything being automatically ruled out. You always struck me as a rogue who would take me by the waist and thrust into our futures something otherworldly. A universe where you and I could exist, together, without the prefix. Without the pretense of morality, or their bloodied hands reaching up, up, up to smear the makeup, the genetics of you and I. Evading their will to leave a mark, the letter red. Armed with their bible verses and parables, their chastity belts and holy water and confessionals. Their constructs of right and wrong.

All of the things that I would forsake for you.

But it’s always only half of a story, unfinished after years of writing. A labor of love that has never quite reached its full potential or reaped any kind of tangible reward. The experience excruciating but essential to the existential. The protagonist has a purpose, but there are holes in the plot.

If what they say about the root of all great art being conflict is true, then we have the potential to be a masterpiece. Abramovic and Ulay. Performance art at its finest.

I love you. I have loved you since the moment that we met, and I believe that I will die loving you, if death is to come for me some day. After all, loving you has always been a bit like standing at the other end of a raised revolver with fewer than six bullets left to travel through the barrel. I know you would never hurt me unless I asked you to, and depravity dictates that I do. So at some point, the question becomes: Will I ask you to fire, or do I pull the trigger for you?

I know I have allowed myself to become the willing victim. Not in the traditional sense, but in the sense that I am really, truly asking for it. Whatever the papers might say, whatever the death certificate reads, I know the truth. And I will go to my grave guilty of that. Because even if I could walk away, if I could even just look away, you could still blow a hole through my head with every breath you take.