1+1=you

You know how, in movies, there is always a hooker with a heart of gold? Or a criminal, a man with a difficult past who, if given a chance, would reveal that underneath it all, he is living kindness, he is some saint sent to save us or at least the female romantic lead of whatever story we’re being told? There are so many stories like this. The whore, the thief, the violent, the insane – if we would simply patiently dig through the negative, there would be the positive, the warm heart, the kindness, the cookies baking, the wife the mother the husband the perfect friend. But it’s never actually like that. The whore is a whore and that’s all there is to it and the thief is going to steal just as much as he damn well pleases with no regard for how much work you’ve put into helping him realize his true butterfly beauty. Everyone is fucking determined to remain a caterpillar, and no amount of love or self righteous support is going to change that. Even if you managed to find someone who had all that shiny perfect positive under their nasty negative, the golden heart might be fucking boring and it could turn out that the only real thing going for that crazy violent drunk was being crazy violent and drunk, and really, you should have known all along that if once you got rid of the surface what’s underneath is never as much of a prize as you thought it would be and it is no fun to fuck a saint, they are invariably bad lays. 

The night I met you was the first time I believed that the story might be true and maybe we weren’t all being lied to all. the. fucking. time and maybe just maybe ohgodplease there might be someone who was this and that, not this or that, and all I wanted to do was wade through you for as long as you’d let me or as long as it was still what I wanted to do, and I wouldn’t dig through your exposed negative, I promise, I would just watch and wonder and want and have fun with you, because what else is there, really, when it’s over?

 

What if What if What if What if What if What if

 

What if every time you felt something about someone or something that you felt like you couldn’t say to that person, about that something, even though you knew it would make you feel about a million times better for at least one second, and that that one second of a million would make all the seconds of feeling like dirt and shit and saliva mixed together on a shoe shoved into a face worth it, totally worth it, you said that something to someone you didn’t care about at all? Do you think that would help? I mean, you wouldn’t tell them you didn’t feel it about them, you would just say whatever it is you think it would help to say, like “The sound of you laughing, throaty and low, is maybe the best thing I’ve ever heard and I would do anything, no matter how fucking ridiculous, just to hear it again” or “Immediately after I started loving you, I started hating you and just kept going and I don’t see any other way for it to have gone and now that’s all that’s left and I don’t even remember what loving you was like” or “yes, that’s right, it was me that killed your dog that time and I am not even kind of sorry and I would do it again” or “I hope you fucking die, but more than that I hope that everyone you love dies in front of you, you terrible fuck” or “I have never had sex that terrible in my entire life, what is wrong with you” or “when you smile, things go crooked and I can’t walk straight’ or “I don’t even ever want to have sex with you, I just want you to kiss me and then I want to keep knowing you forever” and then you would wait awhile and see if it helped. 

I do not understand why we are not all doing this already. Unless I don’t know, we are? 

 

An Encyclopedia of Broken Things

It’s light out. It has been for hours. The sun is shining and I am the only person in the world, in this world, with a smile so bright. The sun might not even be out, it’s possible we’re all basking in me. 

 

Everyone who isn’t you. 

 

How did we even get here, how is it that the sun came out and the world is new and everything is everything and I am the only person in the world with a smile so bright red? How did we get from last night to this moment without any stories to tell, without any sentences that end with “and then we both started laughing and everything was fine again”?

 

I don’t know how we got here, but this is all your fault. It’s always your fault, and I stand by that statement, standing here next to the chair because I can’t even stay in the chair, the chair is trying to destroy me like you tried to destroy us and it’s all clear now. This is your fault, and I can’t stop smiling at you this way, with my teeth loose which is okay because if they are loose they are still here, they are still in my mouth like I want you to be in my mouth, even now, right now, you and my loose teeth jammed in together behind my red red smile.

 

I don’t know what I’m going to do next, so I’m just standing by the chair I can’t stay in and I’m still smiling because I am certain that if I stop smiling there will never be anything to smile about, ever again, so I can’t stop, not even for an instant because a life without a reason to smile is like fucking with condoms which is why we don’t ever, ever do that.

 

I’m going to stand here until you come back, until you wake up, and tomorrow I’m going to carve our names inside a heart on my arm and pretend that my arm is a tree, and pretend that that constitutes a vow, that that heart on my tree-arm is a wedding without the possibility of escape that divorce or death provides, because I will never let you die without me, I will never let you be without me. Not anymore.

 

Old Dead Stock

I’m only not knowing that all my strings have been cut when we’re locked in this filthfuck, this grappling in the dirt and the muck that we carry wherever we go. I know I’m a puppet, I know I’m playing games, I know I’m being played, but with your limbs leaving marks I’m forever forgetful for the forever that lasts right up until I get up, take a shower, and go back to the way my life is supposed to be lived. 

 

I keep meaning to lose your number. I keep meaning to lose the need to have you around to make me numb-er. I keep meaning to do a million things I never do, and that this has been an intention for as many as nine years or as few as seven (because time is never linear for me, I have no lucid chronology and this is only one of the ways you know me, the ways you knew me) isn’t terribly surprising. I am almost always fat full of intent and I am also almost always failing. 

 

Every time I crawl out of your car, covered in you, thighs slick with sweat and everything I used to forget that I feel, I am slammed back down to an earth where I am moving precisely how I am told, how I am required. I am set back down, cold, wet, tired and just a little bit less human than I was when I began. 

 

It is these times that I wonder if I am using you for more than the things I know I am using you for. If I have become a mystery even to myself, if I have become such a gifted liar that I am not even capable of telling myself the truth, about this or any of the other stupid and ugly crimes I am always committing, always committed to. It is these times that I think I might be crawling all over you in a desperate attempt to crawl out of me.

 

When is the when?

I’m going to be happy without you 

                        (you left your name behind)

I’m going to be happy without you

                       (and some of your taste in my mouth)

I’m going to be happy without you

                      (just trying to forget you through fucking and lying, but I end up telling                           him [all the hims]:

                                 Maybe it could been you I was addicted to – your voice and hands.                                    but you never once stole my breath and replaced it with laughter,                                      and the truth is that I’d have fucked any —-  for the chance to                                           whisper his name one more time while sweating. 

                         and somehow things go sideways)

But

I’m going to be happy without you

                         (someday, I’m sure it’ll be true. no fingers fucking for yesterday, no sad                           sad songs while wishing to be sucking silly, no daydream dares to do                             something, oh anything to fix your feeling, no – no you outside of                                     nostalgia nights around a bottle of wine, no, no you.)

 

I’m going to be happy without you.

 

To: Answer Your Question

Compulsive overeater. That’s what the doctor called me. She called me that right to my face, and I couldn’t respond, I couldn’t say one tiny thing in response, because I was too busy being stunned by how wrong she was. And wondering what she had on under that white coat. I mean, I could see her pants and her sensible shoes, her beige blouse, but what I was wondering about was what was underneath that. Not so far under that we’re talking about her bones and organs, the way her blood flows, not even so far that we’re talking about skin. Just one layer under the beige and the brown. I was wondering if under that was black and lace, and I have to admit that I was hoping desperately for the answer to be revealed and be no. I wanted the answer to be more beige and more brown, huge beige panties and a tiny brown bra that I could make her leave on while I was fucking her. I could just bunch the beige in my hand and shove it aside as I shoved into her. 

This is what I was thinking when I was busy being shocked that she, a doctor, could be so wrong about me, a patient. My mother says they call us patients because we have to have patience if we want treatment. That seems like assigning them a characteristic that they do not have, a sense of humor. I think a lot of what we call paranoia is just believing that human characteristics can be applied to something that is not human, which maybe they can, but then you add believing that you know what character traits they have and why and nothing makes sense anymore. That’s what I think. My mother says a lot of things that I think this about, but instead of telling her I just hug her yellowed paper skin to mine and say something soothing, and I don’t let on that I am also thinking about what is going on under the nightgown she is always wearing. I don’t let on that during the touching of my skin to her skin I am wondering if she still gets wet, if that is perhaps the one part of her body that I could touch and not think about dead leaves. 

You asked me what the doctor said. That is what she said. She said that I am a compulsive overeater, and I was too busy thinking about her bent over the table where I am sitting in a too small paper gown, bent over and waiting for me, bent over and spreading herself open so that I could see that she is ugly, too, to realize that this would be my only chance to tell her that she was wrong. I am not a compulsive overeater. I am constantly eating food because if I don’t, I will eat me. The only way to make sure that I don’t is to make myself too large to be consumed so easily. 

 

To: Help You Help Me Understand

It’s only three AM, but I’m considering staying awake forever. Not just for tonight. Sleep and I have this love/hate thing, it’s the kind of intense you know could be for real. We could go the distance, fists flying, fists fucking, fisted flailing. We could be real. I don’t understand it when people tell me you can’t love what you hate – how can you love what you don’t hate? What do you hold on to in the middle of the night when your lover is still gone and the light left hours ago, and they don’t answer the phone, and you call and call and you call and call and you call and call, and at some point you stop leaving messages but then you start again, and you try not to sob too much, but then you end up screaming and you can’t for the life of you figure out whether it is better to threaten or to beg, if you can’t hold on to hate? What do you hold on to on those long and ugly nights if you are not holding on to hate to hold on to sanity to hold on to this stupid relationship with this person whose face you just want to break into pieces, you just want to shatter, you just want to slam into the concrete like it was a pillow while you fuck them from behind? If it isn’t hate that makes love possible and tangible, I don’t know what it is. 

 

 

Anyway. It is late here, or maybe it is early. This is one of the many things I have never been able to fully understand, like if you should tell people your horror stories so that they will feel sorry for you, like the one about the time when you were so, so young and so, so trusting and then your dad threw a huge marbled glass ashtray through the window, the noise it made was obscene but kind of perfect, and you knew you would never be quite the same again, you knew you would always know that there was something violent right around the corner, or if you should keep them to yourself so that people will see you weeping quietly once in awhile and they will think that you are perfect and mysterious and so, so strong, and they will want to be like you but they will also not want to be like you because really they will also be thinking that you are so, so cold. Like that. I do understand whether it is early or late like I do not understand what to do with my horror. 

 

It is whatever it is, and I am not sleeping. I started out not sleeping because there was work to be done, but then I didn’t really do all of the work and I am still awake,  not doing the work, and the work is still not done and this is a thing. It might be a good thing and it might be a bad thing and it might just be a thing that is, but it is, undeniably, a thing. Instead I am listening to noises and drinking a beer that someone put coffee in (bless that person, I could not decide if I should have coffee or a drink, but then I found this in the back of the refrigerator, it may not have been mine originally, but it is now and I am grateful for this as I am grateful for anything that takes a decision and makes it something I do not have to make) and I am that kind of tired that is not tired, that kind of tired that wants to pretend that it is really not at all anything, not any kind of thing, it wants to pretend it is the opposite of tired, but it can only do that if the eyelids will sign a pact and keep to the treaty, and they are considering breaking it, the tired can tell. 

 

So I am almost sort of tired, and sleep is a long way off, because there are so many things that need to be done, besides the work. There are so many things to read and write and say and do, so many people to greet and hug and fuck and punch in the face, the gut, the groin, so many apologies to make, so many thanks to hand out. There is always so fucking much to get done, and it is this that makes me lie in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling and thinking about the way light works, because if I don’t think about that, I have to think about all the things I should be doing when I am lying in bed staring at the ceiling thinking about the way that light works.

 

When I am doing this I am feeling like I am 14 years old, and then I realize that I don’t really recall being fourteen years old, and I don’t really recall being fifteen or sixteen years old either. It isn’t that I don’t remember anything that happened when I was that age, it is just that I don’t remember what age I was when the thing I am remembering happened, and even when I think I do, I am later proved wrong. Time went non linear on me so long ago, and now there is no lucid chronology I can use as a point of reference. Even saying that time went non linear so long ago  feels like it could be an accidental lie, like maybe it was last week or a month ago or two years ago that it did this thing to me, and then I have to spend at least an hour (I think, who knows?) knowing that so long ago  means something different to everyone, or maybe it means something different only to me and I do not know that it means the same thing, a set thing, a set amount of time, to everyone else because this lack of chronology extends itself and becomes a lack of language to describe chronology, becomes a lack of everything everyone else has where time is concerned.

 

So it is what time it is, here, and it is what time it is, there, and the two are different things but also I am fairly certain that they might really be the same thing, and time differences are just a trick played, a lie told, a practical joke. I was in bed staring at the ceiling thinking about the way that light works, when I remembered the way that light worked when you were lying in the bed with me. It was exactly the same as it is now that you are not in this bed with me, and just there, in that moment, in that one uglydumb moment, I knew that I never loved you and I never hated you, and I think my heart might actually be broken forever just from knowing that.

 

I thought you should know, too.

 

That might seem cruel, but it is the only way to give myself a tiny piece of hope, you see. When I realized that I never loved or hated you because light worked precisely the same way without your presence as it did with it, I also realized that you might be lying somewhere, or maybe sitting, or maybe standing, and realizing that light was not even one tiny bit different without me, and then you would know that you never hated me and so you never loved me, and that is a thing I cannot bear. I simply cannot bear the idea of you knowing that, and so I thought if I told you this, that I never loved you and i never hated you, never, no matter what I said or did, the times we fought and fucked like forever, like forever and ever amen, the times I fucked you in the street, the times I held your hand and bought you ice cream, none of those times, none of them meant nothing but none of them meant three little words, I thought if I told you this then you would hate me and you would hurt and you would reach out and lash out and you would try to hurt me, and maybe then I could hate you. If I could hate you now, maybe I could love you now, and maybe loving and hating you now would somehow get lost and tangled in my lack of understanding of time, and I would believe that it was then that I loved you, then that I hated you like a thing I wanted to kill, and everything would be okay again, and I could go to sleep. It is the only thing I can think to do for us. 

 

Do you understand? I want you to.

 

 I hope this finds you well.Good night. (Is it night?) 

 

Too, Too, Too Many Times

I just want to be more than a haunting to you. Remember that? Remember those days? The days and nights where we were something solid to one another?

 

Maybe you don’t. That would be worse than this, I think.

 

I’m supposed to tell you that I want you to be happy, that I want you to have forgotten me, or to only think of us once in awhile , to pause with a sweetly wistful look on your face before continuing on with your grocery shopping, your phone call, your fucking in the back of a tiny car, your drinks with friends. I think that that’s what I’m supposed to tell you. It might even be what I’m supposed to want.

 

I can tell you that, and sometimes I do. I tell you a lot of things, so it’s really not that surprising that this one makes it into the rotation. I tell you that I hope you are happy, really happy, I tell you that I am lying in a pool of my own sticky blood and I hope you know that this is all your fault, all your fault, all your goddamned fault, I tell you that all I want is just one more filthy fuck in a place where fucking isn’t supposed to be going on, I tell you that I think of you often, I tell you that I never think of you. I tell you a lot of things with my hand on the little button on the phone that makes certain that no matter how many times I dial your number, you never answer.

 

I want you to still love me, I want you to still be here with me, burning down churches and staging hand holding sneak attacks. I want you to be hurting, I want you to fucking suffer with wanting me, I want you to feel my name in each of your veins, and I want you to call. I want you to call. I want you to call me and call me and call me, I want you to panic about how many times you have called me and swear to yourself and whoever you call your best friend now that you will never call me again because only creepy stalkers call people that many times in the middle of the night and fail to ever say anything.

 

I want you to never call me again. I want to hear your voice in a bar and spin around with such speed that I nearly have whiplash, only to see someone that doesn’t even vaguely resemble you and feel something that isn’t disappointment but is the closest thing to it I’ve felt in months. I want to see you on a street corner and race after you, heart pounding, trying to look casual while wiping the sweat from my brow before realizing that it wasn’t you, again. It wasn’t you this time anymore than it was the last five times I bolted down the street trying to look like I wasn’t chasing anyone.

 

I want to find a way to move backwards in time, and spend at least a day or two locked in the night that we sped down the hill in your car, taking turns screaming with our bodies bent through your sunroof, screaming blindly and wildly, screaming nothing, screaming song lyrics, screaming screaming screaming, all because it was possible and if something is possible then to not do it is a crime we are not capable of committing.

 

I want to commit. I want us to commit to one another, to commit to not doing this anymore, whatever this is that we are doing, that we are almost always doing. This is what we are doing every time we are not being something, but somehow we never get around to being nothing, and I want us to commit to not spending one.

More.

Fucking.

Instant.

being something so vague. I need us to decide and then stick to that decision, are we something or are we nothing, are we here or did we vanish somewhere along the way? Anything is better than living in a shadow play where all the puppets are us and all the puppeteers are us also but we can somehow never figure out how to untangle the strings and figure out the trick.

 

Do you understand the things that I am saying to you? Do you? Can you even fucking hear me? I’m yelling in your ear, I feel like I have made a very successful megaphone and am holding it less than one inch away from your face, but something tells me that you are still not listening, that you are still not listening, at least, for comprehension, and that you are just waiting for the right moment to slip back into being the thing that isn’t something but isn’t nothing and I tell you now, I will not stand for it, I will not allow it. I will simply not let this continue to be the case between you and I, and I do not need your permission to make this decision. My decisions from this day forward are going to be, above all, like a decapitation, one swift strong blow or the head will never roll.

 

I want you to say that you understand. I want you to say something that leads me to believe that you understand at least the underlying ideas of what I am saying to you now. Of what I have been saying to you since the beginning of time, it feels like. You are older than me but somehow I feel as though I have been saying the exact same tired words to you your entire life, and I do not think you have heard a one, not even the times you’ve responded and we’ve had entire conversations like this. I do not think you heard even those words.

 

Can you begin to understand how I feel at times like these? Half drunk on whiskey and painkillers, well on my way to being an irrational being, if such a thing can exist where rational beings don’t (I do not know – is it possible to be the opposite of a thing that is not?) I feel as though I am the only one feeling anything here.

 

This is what kills me, the idea that this is not killing you. Why isn’t this killing you? Why aren’t you dead yet from the pain of knowing that I do not want you anymore, that I do not want you to stand near me, that I do not want to harass schoolchildren by your side, that I do not want to drink too much and run into the street half naked and screaming with you just to see what might happen? There are so many things that I do not want to do with you anymore.

 

Don’t you hurt over any of them? Don’t any of them make you want to lie in a pool of your own sticky blood and call me and tell me that you hope I know this is all my fault?

 

Oh god. Is this all my fault?

 

To the streets, to the citizens. To the citizens: TO THE STREETS!

I feel us like a bomb under heavy water, lonely riders all only occasionally knowing that we are not lonely, not alone, not even riding but standing. In opposition, in your midst, in solidarity and enraged. We are, we do, we must endure and we endure and we do endure, all for the hope of a change, a movement barely perceptible if you are not awake at night, all night, waiting for news of a shift, this shift, any shift away from the universal no, the almighty ostritching that is everyone saying no to knowing, saying no to doing anything about what we would have no choice but to know if only we would open our eyes. I feel us like an engine with only the faintest memories of combustion– I feel us waiting to explode and desperately trying to remember how. I feel us and I wonder if I have gone insane, if it is going insane that would make a person know that they are not alone out here, that they are not the only one waiting for a yes, waiting for a sign, waiting for a voice, waiting to be a voice, waiting to stop waiting. If it is going insane that would make wanting something so badly while wanting it’s exact opposite at the same time seem like not going insane.  

 

To all of you

 

When I run into a coworker in the bathroom, and we’re both washing our hands, I won’t say anything if they don’t. But when they do, and we’re talking about whatever the weather is doing or how glad/angry/sad we are that it is whatever day of the week that it is, what I really want to tell them is something about themselves, something probably no one has ever told them because no one feels free to be honest but for christ’s sake, if you can’t be honest in the bathroom with your hands dripping wet while you’re awkwardly reaching for a paper towel, when can you? 

I would have told her that she desperately needs to have some fun before it’s too late, and that we never know when it will be too late and it’s possible that it will be too late by the time our hands dried, and that if she wanted I would take her with me. Somewhere.