ACHE Magazine January 2011

i want someone to bury their head in my neck, wrap their arms around my ribcage, and hold me together because i can’t seem to remember where i left the rest of my atoms. i’m not falling apart, i’m just forgetting, forgetting, forgetting myself and where i’ve been and mornings in february where the light cuts through me, and the streets in portland where the people hold doors. my friend patricia taught me how to read the grounds left over the in the bottom of a cup of turkish coffee yesterday, and now that i’ve seen the future i’ve forgotten my past. i’m pretty sure that means i don’t deserve tomorrow, if i’m ungrateful enough to forget today. today, when i realized that my grandmother and i have the same hands. today, when gratitude was born as a bastard in my kitchen and i stared out the window wishing for the dusk to swallow me. today. to days, to arms, to war; from home. always from home, from heart. i am either a blissful desert or the faithful arctic. so, please, wrap your arms around me, and don’t shudder when you feel my ribs. i’m so thin because i have to be able to blow away someday. i have to be able to go home. i have to be able to remember home. i want flour in my hair, gravel smarting in my knees, and dirt wedged beneath my fingernails. fiendish, filthy beauty, contested but never conquered. i want quiet fury to marshall around and about me, the purest form of aggression to set free as i see fit. i find some odd strength in the way my voice quavers when i’m singing, vehemence clouding my windpipe but sharpening my vision. i know that, luxuriating beneath this contempt, is true fear; the fear that i will never escape, that i shall never be released. for now, i wait, wondering if my strength is fermenting or decaying. twenty five days. his eyes change color with the months, mine fade in turn with the clouds. boy of ochre and patience, girl of lapis lazuli and vengeance; we reflect light beautifully. his stitches are uneven, shining beneath his skin of spun sugar, cardboard, and mercury glass. his mother worries about him, she worries about me. she has gone blind reading maps of the places she will never be. her pulse throbs along to her thought of, “be safe, be safe, be safe.” he hums under his breath sometimes, not songs, but stories about his family. he tells me about the dog with the grizzled muzzle who bit him because she loved him too much. he mutters his way through epic poems, pronouncing only the vowels that fit comfortably against his teeth. sometimes our voices mesh together, melding in some rumbling harmony that we can’t quite understand. when i sing, my voice is clear. he only hears the buzzing in my chest. i tell him about the time i danced down the stairs, but my feet fell out of rhythm and i missed six steps. i’ve stumbled, i’ve tripped, i’ve collapsed, and he’s always been on the ground before i registered it’s existence. he kisses my broken arm. i tell him about the water in upstate new york, how it tastes like the air in oregon. we will go, and we will make our home there, where the highways are wrought with roses and homeless men command me to smile. they have nicknames for us. we forgot our real names long ago. we will go and we will make our home there, always dashing away, always feeling free, always returning; we will never be happy, but we will be alive. she told me to sleep, her mask of sympathy slipping and one of alarm glaring through to me. i’ve been doing that too much lately, i’ve been concerning people i don’t converse with, there are always questions. foggy days and graceless nights, that is who i am now. i’ll change my hair, i’ll wear a jacket, i’ll profess greed, promiscuity, and lawlessness because that is who i am supposed to be. i won’t sleep, though, not out of spite but out of self preservation. exhaustion is preferable to extinction. the sidewalks wail and the cars purr, and if i stood in the intersection, i’m sure the tanker wouldn’t see me in time. there’s too much buzzing in my brain i have to deal with, mental acrobats to catch and relinquish. you can’t feel pain on the surface of your brain, did you know that? it seems so ironic. there’s nothing that could hurt more than the knowledge that you could be somewhere else, but that you would never leave. miles are bulwarks, i’m surrounded by smoke. fog of the ages. i will never sleep. so much emphasis on letters and numbers, symbols and signs. on crimes, and bloodlines, the snake’s trail under your skin. but you are not your father, no matter how much he drank. you are not your mother, no matter how beautiful she was, and how grotesque she is now. you are not the cause of the tides, and you are not a catalyst. you say you need to find yourself; what’s wrong with the skin you’ve already found? we’ve all got space between our atoms, love, clumsily collected into temporary cans. we’ve all got gaps between our sentences, and sometimes we wake up just a little too late. and sometimes, we fall apart. and then we are not “we,” anymore.