It Took Three. The First Killed Her Parents, In The Home They Used To Share. The Second Took Her Legs,

When I think on 18, and the years that have passed since then, I realize how many little deaths I’ve had in my one life. How many versions of me had to abandon my flesh for ephemerality for me to exist, fettering away. Do they watch me, the way runner up pageant girls watch the winner be crowned with sparkling tears gliding down her cheeks to match her sparkling tiara? Do they envy me? Or do they watch in glum acceptance, the way a parent would as their child draws in spontaneous sharpie all over their orderly white walls. Do they think they know better? Worst of all, do they watch in horror, the way the drug addicted’s partner would as the one they love most spirals down deeper and darker paths? Do they pity me?

Do they think of me at all? How lonely it would be to exist in this world as only one version of me.

I was his worry stone.

he couldn’t pick my face out of a crowd,

Or name a single interest of mine;

he couldn’t bother to wash his mug in the sink,

Or put the coffee on in the first place;

he couldn’t braid my hair while he spoke,

Or untangle the nest he made.

All he could do was rub his hands together,

And wonder where I’d gone,

after eroding me away.

My innocence was taken by hands no bigger than my own, another child who’s eyes swam blue with cold apathy. She couldn’t have known what she was doing was wrong, for I recognize now, the same things were being done to her. How can I raise my fists to the one who hurt me when she had no innocence to begin with, and I had something to lose. She was damned from the start.

Remembering him is like getting to know a shard of glass. I push my finger tip down gingerly into his jagged profile and draw tears; he is not whole anymore. He will never be whole again. I could sip tea at my window sill and watch the clouds roll on, but I prefer to live on the edges of his memory. I prefer to dwell in my scrapbooks and peak into his diaries, peeling back the brokenness of disappearance into the smoothness of understanding. Floating in the ether I am pricked again by the knowledge that no matter how deeply I learn of his soul, I cannot unplunge him from the river styx. And I am content to keep hurting, I am content to keep pressing my soft body into the recesses of his absence, if it will only bring me closer to his place in nothing. I am content in that.

Why is love not enough to keep someone here,

but enough to take them away?

I’m like a child, the way my mind works. I want us to look at each other, but I keep covering my eyes.

She caressed her lover’s hair like a bird tending her nest; she saw only futures in the black tangles clinging to her fingers.

I felt a twinge at first in my stomach, like I’d eaten bad crab, only worse. Like I’d eaten two bad crabs. Horrendous to even imagine. As my god unraveled me by an invisible umbilical cord leading back to him, my skin loosened and bones leaned on each other like the limbs of a wooden puppet. Weirdly hollow, with a sudden cacophony of clatter, I simply disappeared. I come to you now as a memory. A ghost, maybe. Or a cloud of events so positively stupid and unyielding that not even a god could get rid of it. I’m sure you’re wondering how I pissed off a god I so dutifully doted on for years on end to the point of being turned to dust, I must tell you, the reasons are long and each grow more foolish than the last. It began the day I blamed god. And he blamed me back.

What is there to do but wait for everything to come crashing down in a sudden cold splendor, and remove the sand from beneath my feet.

I thought life would be easier than this. That opportunities would fall in my lap, that I would never make mistakes. Typing it out now the ideas seem so foolish, but I truly believed them. The invincibility of youth waxes and wanes like the moon, beautiful, but an illusion. A display of only crescent truths and half-honesties. Once in the blue, darkness disrobes the white lies, and I am reminded of my poor decisions and silly aspirations in their naked blackness. Phases of judgment are all that is left of me, my future self peering backward at everything I have done and haven't done. I wait only for sunrise.