I haven’t slept.
I could not tell you what prompted that decision, but the moment you hit four in the morning, there is no turning back, so I’ve reared into the next afternoon like my eyeballs are damn near oozing from their sockets.
Every man is leering toward me and every woman is afraid of me and I hope to Christ the roles could reverse one day, walking this suburban town with my suburban peers and my suburban neighbors who watch their suburban sitcoms and have suburban missionary and sleep on separate pieces of furniture in their suburban house.
I could bitch and whine about how counterproductive this is to my bullshit revolution, but it’s better than what I’m doing. I’m dying out here and it’s the only way to survive.
Every time I’ve taken the initiative to wash myself and look semi-presentable to set foot on the street, I signed the contract of humanity: that I deserve happiness, will not always get said feeling, and sometimes will feel sorrow. It’s not bleak. I’m not bleak. Bleak are those surfing their highs and waiting for their lows so they can truly gossip about friends.
I’m without sleep, but I am the most reasonable person I know.
I pressed “record” on the tape recorder. There was a silence between the two of us before we started speaking, and this was my fault: I was wary of my voice recorded. It was firm and it was black, neither of which I wanted to be. Nor did I want to be Southern, and when I would play the tape back for analysis that night, I would cringe hearing the ugly, deep tones of my mother in my own throat. I shudder, and I remember my question for Marko. “What do you think of yourself?”
He uncrossed his legs and leans forward, as if getting ready to tell a story. I leaned forward in response, and he wrings his hand. And I know this will be good.
“I think I’m pretty damn neat. In America, I see everyone hates them. They do not hate themself. They think they are okay, they want to relieve the poor saps with no confidence. That sucks.”
I cleared my throat and sat for a good thirty seconds in silence, wondering why I was hurt by a fourteen year old’s comment. This is why he is here, yes? He’s wrong. I’m fine.
“What about those who are genuinely down on themselves, Marko? Not everyone is as assured as you are, you know.” I realized how casual I sounded. You’re a therapist, Kathleen, not his goddamn mother. “Do you think there’s anything wrong with those people?”
“No, I said that I was neat, but this does not make a difference. You might be a good person and end up doing nothing for anyone. The actual person and him who influence other people are two different things, I think. Da. So I, you’re black, right?” I warily nodded. ”No, no, do not be offended! I just assume that you have a problem. It can not be 1965 anymore, but ten years later, not much better. You must be injured. You do not like yourself. But you’re a good person.”
This was the first time anyone had given a compliment to me so point blank, and I was elated, so elated that I did not feel his hand up my thigh for quite a few moments. My arm went faster than my brain and I smacked the boy’s forearm like a buzzy fly by some garbage.
“Listen,” I said in my mother’s growl again. “I have baggage, and you sure as hell do too. You’re here. But I am not the one who needs to be assuaged. I am not the one who must be saved. You might even be smarter than me, but there is no way in hell that I will let you take advantage of me, or any other girl for that matter. Think outside of yourself.”
He pouted for a moment, and put his hands in his overalls’ pockets. “Izvinite,” he muttered under his breath. I assumed correctly that this meant sorry in Serbo-Croat, accepted his apology as sincerely as he meant it, both of which I’m not sure of, and we eventually said goodbye for the session. This was far from the last I saw of Marko, but the last I saw of the boy.
When I set out to put words together, I like to put myself in someone else’s mindset, for fear of damaging what’s tangible and existent at this moment; I can’t do that this time. One cannot say “I love you” without a true “I.”
We’ve been desperate. Waking up in the middle of the night feeling like my heart leaped forth from my chest and away from me and running into the kitchen to swing open the windows for cool air when it was 40 degrees Fahrenheit is not one of our most tender memories, but the embrace we shared when the cold sweat dried was soaked in tears, drenched in brushed off embarrassment and in pure neediness. Every single facade we’d built for our lifetimes was torn apart, stepped on, and spit on in our union. I cannot leave you knowing that you carry so many dangerous of me.
Still, darkness is only as permanent as its host. I could collapse knowing that you think my burdens have made you struggle, for no person’s own demons should hurt another’s voice, heart, soul. I told you what I did in confidence and nothing more, and yet I recoil at a helping hand: this is my issue, mine, mine alone. I am sorry.
You know the way teenagers say the word ‘mom.’ That five-octave howl was all I was groaning on the car ride down to Virginia. “No, Daniel,” she’d answer. “I’m not letting you spend another summer roasting in the basement on your laptop! This’ll be good for you. Get some air, see your cousin. She needs some company, you know.”
I hadn’t seen my cousin since I was maybe five at a barbecue. Around that time was my big firefly phase, in which I would catch fireflies in a mason jar and I didn’t let them go. Why I didn’t release them, I don’t know. Maybe when I was being taught by a relative how to do it they got interrupted, but here I was, the big serial insect killer, traipsing around the backyard while the adults guzzled down their Coronas. And in came Sheila, one year my senior, in her pink dress that looked like it itched all over. She taught me how to set them free. “So you don’t have to clean the glowy gunk out,” she explained.
And now she would be seventeen. Apparently her hair was dyed black instead of the strawberry blonde I remember, and she had “problems,” as my mom delicately put it. Everyone in my family spoke of her like a burden. I’d hear stories of her going in and out of the hospital, but I never had the nerve to ask something so personal about something I hadn’t (and wish I had) gotten to know. So her family was right, a mess she was, down to each chewed nail. The kindest mess I knew.
I was punished for being an X person
My hair was once pulled up by a Y person
They spit in my ear as they spoke with hard ‘k’s
But I refused to take in a word
I didn’t know what was happening below
And the world answered back that I was disgusting
A monster bursting forth from my pelvis
Being hit for bleeding when I should have come
I understood that I existed for others
To see, to touch, take
No, I do not wish to be proud of my affliction
I had no hand in it
But what I wouldn’t give to feel neutral
Like Ys can
Penelope, 43, crumpled on yellowed sheets,
an array of photographs at her side.
Everything about her room is pallid canary:
wallpaper chipping and rippled
from ancient children soda fights,
taut, tough, working woman hands
and the images they hold,
her eyes.
A car door outside slams for the last time.
“I don’t want to leave here.”
David, 65, spread on clean sheets,
a bottle of gin a sixth limb.
Everything about the room is newborn white:
towels bent in funny shapes
from the sanctimonious cleaners,
cards of hotel TV channels
and the images they hold,
his eyes.
His lids open for the first time.
“I’m never getting out of here.”
i.
he and she were bound together by prickling vines, and on these ropes of green were their fruits. they would sit and they would love, and although so pressed, so forced they sat, their bodies became vessels at intervals with their blood rushing a certain way. three minute grace periods of heaven. the fruits would wait and when the pair finally broke their splintered cord, the skin of the plant remained; prune placentae of romance in a lush garden.
ii.
beyond the garden and in the home stood parents, bleeding and drunk from their life-sentences to each other. this home was not furnished, their garden was not tangible. a new spot every night for home. it can only be so long before only the mind is a garden, home trickling from the boxed ears of the children.
iii.
yellowed books would wait on the shelf, and on that so yellowed night after the parents stabbed each other in the arms or something like so again, they leaped into the laps of the children. new worlds, old worlds, familiar worlds, worlds at all constructed in their sleep and every year of all time happened at once, like all does in any learned heart.
“These tents reek of animal,” O’Rourke complained unjustly; he killed the beast skinned for the tarp. The war had gotten to the point where those upstanding non-men in the posters crouched down and cried about mom and cried about baby. They don’t tell you about these things.
Disregarding the wafting stench, William and his snatched comrade waded through the dirt and into the tent. “I’m scared, Lieutenant,” moaned the boy. “Please sir, have a heart.”
“Call me Bill, please. You’ll be back with your ranks soon. I… need this.” He shed layer after honorable layer of uniform and as he stood in his knickers and folded his clothes next to his stack of smut, he almost felt like the wild child he thought he was before. Not even before the war, despite what he would admit: before his babies, before his wife. “Listen boy, I know you don’t agree. Maybe someday you will. I don’t know you. But you don’t refuse, and it’s good enough.” And through the ordeal, that wispy body floundered in his engorged arms; it was not romance, nor was it even sordid. Only another case of innocence for innocence, and it only occurred to him as the boy ran away clutching undergarments in the blackness back to his tent.
I loved you
and I do
so why are you so far now?
We never did connect
so we would press for dear life
against those glass walls
in search for warmth.
You’ve walked away.
You’re my blot.
And it’s only so long ‘fore the cold
fades you out.
I am young, so young; those above me love to remind me all day and all night. I take this and I believe it, but the swell in my throat stops me. How I would enjoy stupid things and be bored by the vacations and excursions. I remember the sticky lollipop I carried with me far more than the blooming city I roamed through with it. And if only I could have, even for a moment, realized the time’s greatness.
Here I am, tethered to responsibilities I do not want and people I should not need, only for the sticky lollipops. When the bridge ropes tear and realization creeps upon me, only then can I understand how complex it all truly is. Everyone is moving on, and I am not.
i. the ground was awash in danger
with carnivores deliberating in the bushes
so we climbed up our own tree
our anxieties clawing at the bark
ii. my back was stiff in solitude
with you shrugging in insecurity
so i grew my own branch
you not even reaching to take me back
iii. the tree was creaking in old age
with me about to face what was under the carpet
so i clambered to your branch
my chest heaving “for now”
He collected information like the other kids would stamps, coins, and toenails. Every day the rows of books sat like freshly made meals on a platter for a hungry king, and he would devour them all to the bone. Despite his head engorged with thought, none of it could pass the tongue; a useless head, Mom said. “Nothing from him makes any sense,” was a favorite, maybe second to how arrogant he was. She’d kick his head in and he’d retreat into his den, rinse, repeat, so on. For the boy, it was all the same. Never did he mind the periods of his books, nor the time of day as it shone through his window. It was all at once in his learned head.
Saying “home,” the two lips press together and hum all earthy and warm like its subject. Seeing “home,” it’s scattered and disintegrating in my hands and all I can do is press my face up against your shirts and your blankets and hope I can swallow it whole. You’ll go and I’ll go, we’re all going soon, going in a circle and going parallel and going until I feel bile rising in my throat. I purge and I crumple and I ache for that couch and I ache for that stuffed animal and I ache for you. I want sleepy eyes and I want home. It’s in these new couches and these new pillows and these new lovers that I realize my home, stuffed in my ribcage, protected and remote.
I. We’re tiny. We’re fat, groaning machines that croak over ulcers that the universe laughs at; yes, Nietzsche, I know. And yet, will we ever meet this Universe? Pluto will always be Pluto, and will be far, far away as a distant cold reminder of our “insignificance.” It does not matter. We have our Plutos already. We’re humongous that way.
II. We’re ugly. Every single one of us walks with our hair in our face, chemicals thrust down our throats and more of them caking our face to be like that girl, that girl, that girl, always that girl and never this one. Tchaikovsky glasses tend to do that to people, and I am sure that girl is just as ugly as you. We’re gorgeous that way.
III. We’re immoral. The teenagers are fucking and sucking in greasy car parks and the children are setting fire to the cars and the adults are dying young. So the past generations went. So the future generations will go. Everyone above is immaculate; everyone below is filthy. We’re pious that way.
