home

i keep coming back to this place even though it makes my skin crawl. a poison place wrapped in peace. i keep my eyes down. it is amazing what you can see/unsee/know/unknow. that’s a good couch i’ve slept on. that’s a bad window i watched through, waiting for him to come home. that’s a good rooftop, an away space. that’s a bad street, a slammed door. brown is a softness of dirt. brown is his hair and the bruise on my thigh.

it’s time to go home again. i have been tearing pieces of paper like flower petals. this time it will be good. this time it will be bad. good, bad, good, bad, good,

“are you driving home?” my mother’s voice sounds distant. old. static in the line. is that my home, i want to ask. am i even invited or am i intruding?

isn’t he doing better without my footprints? i don’t want to answer about my love life and my failed expectations and my tried-my-best-ness. at the same time i want to tell her absolutely everything about my love life, and how it felt seeing him again and how his hair still smells like that and how sometimes my trying actually leads to doing and how i’m setting better, more specific expectations, and i’m actually meeting them.

i tear the paper. in one future you’re proud of me. pass the wine. in the next, you’re sighing. is that what you’re doing? pass the wine. in some we’re not drinking. in some we’re not talking. in some, i come back and the house is warm and garlic is in the air and we’re all laughing. in some, i come back, and everything we haven’t said is rotting in the air.

“are you coming home?” He asks. i close my eyes.

home? home? where exactly is that?

lovely

I didn’t eat for three days, so I could be lovely.

– confessions

Dearly beloved,

I hope you find their razor blades before they become addicted. I hope you roll back your sleeves and sit down, scars showing, kiss their forehead, and tell them the stories they were too young to know beforehand.

– fragments

I should have known

oh you made me feel terrible things. cut up, violent things.
things i threw up, or held down, or cried out, or sucked in.
things i couldn’t write out, things that wouldn’t stay in, things that ruined me.

but you made me feel stupid.
foolish.
like i’ve dealt with the worst things, but i can’t scrub out all that god i knew better didn’t i from the seams of me.

i never want to feel like that again. like an idiot. like it’s my fault for being dumb. i should have known this would happen.

– excerpt from a book I’ll never write

My heart is tired

Let me take a rest from missing you.

– fragments

hello heaven

You were the moon going down below the trees at night. Oh honey, aren’t you something. Aren’t you the prettiest thing this side of the river. When you laugh it sounds like bells and I am destroyed, aching, burning for the taste of your lips.

when the sun came out i was lost in it. you were the field before the fire. the storm before the break. i understood the holy in the span of your wings. hello godly, hello heaven, hello a breaking i knew the name of.

– excerpt from a book I’ll never write

that’s just beauty

i’ve been thinking of that video, you know, the one where she burns her face for the sake of an even skin tone. i watched it at 2 AM after having nightmares about relationships. i thought i was still dreaming. she put chemicals on her body and fries in them. undoes in them. what a perfect metaphor for beauty worship.

is this girlhood?

oh we wanted to laugh. dumb bitch! in the comments. but i went back to sleep and i dreamed, not nightmare but not comfortable, of the foods i will not let myself eat because of the cost of their calories. i started crying, woke up drenched in sweat, worried i’d somehow transported to the kitchen, worried i’d fucked up and actually done it. god, how terrifying. i remember the wave of gratefulness – no, no, this belly is empty, and it is good to be empty, like this.

how is it different. i’m not a dumb bitch; i’m a refined and self-controlled bitch, up on her shit. it is not dumb-bitch to starve yourself. to restrict. it is a respectable lady thing.

i think of her skin, swollen in the first week, while i go to work in heels and a jacket. my male coworker wears jeans. i think of her, waving at her face, while my hair goes up into professional-bun, stays there long after the headache. i think of her, watery-eyed and turning, bird-like, to look upon the damage she’d done – and i think of me, of my sunday-night facemask that “burns, but like, it works.” 

razors and waxing and eyebrow tweezers and picking at skin and sucking in and sitting properly and suffocating and curling smaller and self-denying and eyelash extensions and taping the second toe to the third so you can’t feel your shoes anymore and destroying, destroying, destroying

2 AM heard the first words i said that morning, softly.

“that’s self-harm”.

or it’s just girlhood. or it’s just beauty.

gravity

in the end, I still go back to you every single time, because no matter how far I drift away from you, you always pull me safely back to the shore just before I drown in my own self-made black holes.

– fragments

Be still my treacherous heart

You asked me one time, “what do you need?”
And I almost said it to you right there and then.  That what I need most is the power not to break, the power not to break under pressure, under love, under your heated gaze.  The power not to break whenever you walk away from me, or whenever  you’re near me, or whenever you hurt me with your words and your stupid actions and inactions.  The power to walk away from you and never look back.  The power to never fall in your arms again every time you come back.

The power to still this treasonous, treacherous heart of mine.

To say I don’t love you anymore and mean it this time.

– excerpt from a book I’ll never write

good is enough.

for a long time, it didn’t work. a bird that never learned flying. a car with no engine. a body god forgot to put a person into.

i would try to be movie-star happy, even a little, even a slice of it. practiced the steps. parties and beaches and selfies with friends. good food and netflix binges. long walks and singing to the radio and talking until the sun was rising.

i was empty. happy slid off me. even good moments felt hollow, like if i looked too hard at them, they’d crumble.

okay.

what worked was settling for good-enough. no, it wasn’t going to be magical. it was going to be okay, and that was still a high goal. i remember one day thinking: my happy will never be as happy as other people are. 

my happy didn’t show up on christmas morning. it didn’t come in a costume on halloween. the hole i had to fill was too big to sew shut for 24 hours. i had to work to patch myself back up. years of it. of slogging. of mud.

and then one day i realized i was more than just okay. i was good. and that good turned into happy. and that happy lasted, bone-strong and steel thick, unbending. my life still had bad things in it. but i had sealed the hole and made the healing stick. i still have days where the darkness comes in.

and some days now, i am movie-star happy. i feel laughter in a place i forgot the sunshine could get to. i wake up on holidays and don’t mime the excitement. the excitement is true.

it might not be, you know, as happy as everyone else’s happy. but i wake up and i feel… good.

– excerpt from a book I’ll never write