Something bent so far in me, but never broke. I kept thinking if I went far enough in the wrong direction something would pull me back. That’s what they don’t tell you about abandonment. When you do it to yourself you don’t even feel it. You don’t feel anything anymore.
What sort of torture is it to know what one has done wrong and know deeper so that it can never be fixed? Must ever inadequacy be magnified, extracted, and plastered in the infant space beneath my eyelids?
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 want so badly to be great but I don’t know how.
Have I always sought permission so fervently, or was I confident in myself once? I can’t remember.
I’ve whittled myself down,
Suckled myself to nothing like a cough drop in a cheek,
And all I have to show for this betrayal, is a familiar flavor in my mouth to mull over as the adults speak.
Taken by salt water taffy, bring me to the childhood I never had
It hurts to watch my father split in two each night.
Right down the middle of his face, one half hops to bed and the other to the garage to yell.
The sleeping half is kind, and has never touched a drop of alcohol, and makes big pancake breakfasts on Sunday mornings.
The waking half is cruel, and has fascist memorabilia on his walls, and drills screws in pictures of the opposition to hang.
I can only love half of him, but I cannot stop even that. His image bleeds in my mind, I cannot grapple with the fact that they are the same man after all—that Nazi’s have daughters, too.
Living in an anxious mind, I know fear intimately, I know nervousness like a favorite cousin-always sitting by me at dinner, insisting we stay in to watch movies instead of go out for dessert because when we go out I don’t enjoy myself at all. Too worried about the drive home, where I’ll park, all the trivial details that make it so I can’t taste the ice cream anyways. And don’t mistake me, I favor my fear just as much as it favors me. It keeps me comfortable, and how I love to be comfortable, though it’s a shaking uneasy kind of comfort. The sort a doomed man has on death row.
What poems do you keep close to your chest like a weak deck of cards? Terrified anyone should know your mind in all its weaknesses and honest throws of emotion. Let me read them, let me know you. I promise not to ruin you. I promise to be kind.