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And then there was light.
The night you first kissed me, you said it was because you were cruel, and nervous fireworks exploded out from our eyelids. I think that's why I always see you draped in gold, even now.
I listened to your heartbeat like the skies listen to the rumbles of the earth, lonely in her solitude. I wished with the brute force of every candle flame and ignited wick in this life and the next that it was singing to me.
I don't believe you were built from scrapped knuckles, ribs, and boys. I'm sure you were a detached eyelash off God that floated down to earth and landed in a lake of honey, spinning with the current into a waist that quakes under my fingertips.
Touching you was fucking electric and the skin between your stomach and collarbone was either a meadow or the abyssal waters swallowing me whole. Touching you was fucking electric, and I can't stomach never being able to do it again.
I suppose it doesn't matter anymore, because either way, I'm stuck there and I want you to know that you're the punctuation of the letter I wrote about how I'm going to take the world by storm.
Amen, mi amor.
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Who’s the other one?
Who’s the diamond and who’s the pearl, in his eyes? Who’s the first? In a fire, who would he save first? Is it me, is it you? I just want to know who comes first, and who’s a damn fool.
Are you mad? Because I’m mad.
I can’t love him with this on my consciousness.
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The space I long for no longer fits me.
The revelation made me want to set myself awash with flames, but I didn’t, because I’m thirty-eight and not eighteen, so I picked up the pen and the brandy to go along with it.
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It's almost three in the morning.
I'm on your front steps, we're drinking cheap beer and I'm starting to forget who I am.
I am a visiting stranger in my own body, and the stranger wants to leave. The stranger wants to leave you alone, on your front porch screaming, crying why, wanting me here, alive. Wanting me to stay.
I light a cigarette, and we keep talking about something that happened to you when you were six, and I come back home. I know myself again.
It starts to rain.
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I fought and I fought hard, and I could have died; but instead, I’m standing back, pulling myself out of the fire, with scars all over my hands and it’s been a terrible ride that I’m not sure was worth the fight. My body hurts and I want to crawl out of it. I want to be something beautiful, but instead, I’m sitting at the bottom of an abyss with scars that still bleed.
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I once saw the face of God; a vast and sudden silence amongst the noisy heavens resting above.
That evening, I dreamt of listening to one side of a conversation I should not have overheard. But instead of how I remember it, he's not the one talking anymore. You are.
I do not watch the skies anymore. I do not look up.
God said: "God made you. God does not care if you are guilty or not, when you serve Him. There is no guilt when you serve."
I said: "I care that I am guilty!" and I'm sorry, but I thought of you.
God was silent.
Everything was silent.
I laid back down in the snow of the Knee, alone.
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I often find myself thinking that love is something that happens to other people; like winning the lottery or finding God blinking owlishly up at you in your sock drawer, between reds and greens and shrunken wools.
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I don't know how to be angry with you, but my pride and your choices demand that I figure it out.
Luckily, it's very easy to make monsters out of people, especially people you have loved and lost. It's so deliciously easy to pick up a pen, and there's a thousand different ill-advised ways to write "THIS IS YOUR FAULT" until the page is full, and you feel nothing but black bile.
It's easier to make myself more of a monster than you ever were. To snap and bite at your approaching hand, to run and hide from your embrace. It's so deliciously easy to bare my teeth.
It's harder to be honest.
No one here has claws or sharp teeth. And no one ever did.
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I may no longer remember your voice or face, but you're still here in the feeling I get when I feel I'm forgetting something.
We can’t simply stay salting our wounds forever. That’s not how it works. That’s not how I want it to work. That’s not how I want to be for you.
†
There is a moment where you are a teenage girl, and you don't belong to anybody. You aren't really a daughter, anymore. Or at least not one that's worth showing off. You aren't anyone's partner. You aren't a mother, yet. You aren't related to anyone at all, and no one cares where you stray at night, or if you come home before midnight.
It's terrifying, it's electric and it's the air in my lungs.
I fell madly in love with everything. Everything made me excited. I felt born anew. Drinking coffee out of cracked cups with badly painted flowers on them! The covers of books I couldn't afford in windows of shops that would scoff at me if I entered! The smell of weed as I walked down damp alleyways! A row of toy horses and soldiers engaged in battle on a windowsill!
You see the world in such a strange and intense and creative and true way in that brief time when you truly believe you belong to no one but yourself. When you are most likely to be murdered, but abuse doesn't touch your personhood, so you saunter down the streets like you're the queen of the shivs, returning to her subjects.
And you don't get stabbed. And a boy shows up at your door and forces you to reckon with the fact that you're someone's. And you think, if you look at a burning candle for too long in the middle of the night, you can still catch a glimpse of that girl, dancing with a lamppost at quarter to two.
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I thought it was right because I won.
Was it worth the fight?
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