I stepped outside with no direction except away from the fear. Years long, it lay unjustified until tonight. Solid, it destroys, shreds. My feet stopped at the edge of the street and I watched my hands gather snow into a little ball. This runs deep. I’m beginning to feel my lack of sleep like a knife. Every hour I laid awake in the past week is now a weight tied to a vice that’s seizing my throat closed. I didn’t look away when my body stood and began to walk. I was too busy locking my joys away in logical conclusions that describe why I should always know better. Who am I to ascribe worth to my self? This is the argument. This is the cause and self-hatred. Hope should never be let into my house. It has keys and is cruel. The piece of snow my body heat turned into ice became a metaphor and I threw it violently down, away, and didn’t look when it shattered.
I did not ask to be let in to their room, but I was welcomed. My coat was told to come off, my scarf and shoes as well. The hat was to live on the back of the couch, come stay. It’s cold outside and we’ve made things with chocolate. My sad suspicions told me this was a bad idea, this was a moral test I would fail, but I stayed because the welcome was genuine and it is not their fault that I am wary and wounded. I sit pointed away, a puzzle composed of elbows and knees that fold into themselves and touch nothing else, and I am hesitant to speak, to intrude upon these people who were not planning for me, who do not know me except as an accessory, but I am handed a cat and expected to be at ease. Expectations and cats are fabulous pieces of social control. Peer pressure, peer pressure, watch some of our television and learn to be a little more real to our eyes.
I should have left when my trust kicked in. Comfort isn’t allowed right now. I should know this more thoroughly than anyone. It hasn’t been at all this year. Instead my lessons require stronger aversion therapy, because look – I’ve made the same mistake twice. When he came in, I put down my dignity, the very little I’m left to scrape together, and invented gods to pray to, so that it might rate some significance to another human being. I never should have come without being called. It was a very cold walk home, long because I couldn’t see through my salt stinging pretence of integrity. There are no angels, only people with wings. A woman stopped me half way when she said, “Hey honey, don’t look like that. If they see you’re broken, they won’t want you.” My feet gave out and she kept walking. Tomorrow I’ll find out if I bruised my knees, all I know now is that I can barely feel my fingers.
There is no distinction in writing this down, but it allows me to communicate with the ether. The vast formless place that language came from. I have been realizing this is my spirit guide, this is my starving on top of the mountains. I try to make here worthwhile with information dissemination, as if every link were an apology to the possibly hypothetical reader. Of course everything here is public. No matter how useless or sacrificial I am to my needs, no matter how exasperated I am at myself for pretending to worth, if it weren’t, this would be the equivalent to screaming into an empty box, closing it, then expecting to hear echoes the next time it’s opened.
I was taken care of in every way that never matters to me. That’s why I forget, you see, because needs and desires are different ripples on the dance floor and my body can twist without me. Bread is nothing, but oh, holding my breathe for me. (‘?o baby i wouldn’t like Death if Death were good:for when(instead of stopping to think)you begin to feel of it’). The heart, that’s what insists on guiding me, that’s what needs to be fed when it complains. There was a warmth in my hips when he sat with me. I remembered how suddenly his hands had defined the curves of my memories, but I knew by the tilt of his laughter that I wasn’t going to be let in where I’ve needed to be. Out(in)side is still starving, there is more than an empty two days. There’s a few years backed up, complaining, waiting for me to address them in some grand speech. Last week I whispered to them. “Remember that name you’ve always kept secret? It’s talking to me.” Last week I forgot who I am, and persisted as who I used to be. See, last year I knew how to smile.