she collects dust. hand and knees, scraped knuckles, right from the floorboards. saliva drenched, from her neck to the base of her spine. she peddles it for pennies, she peddles it for comfort. in from the cold, like a knife, he traces a single finger down her face, down her neck, to the collarbone. she pauses, his finger slides back up to her chin, lifts it. it’s so heavy, sweat down his finger, trembling lip. you are so sincere, he tells her, she moves her head quick, snaps her jaws, takes hold of his finger to the first knuckle. he laughs, she shakes her head. just like a dog, he says and tugs gently: he doesn’t want her to let go, he doesn’t want her to go. he laughs and tugs, there’s much too much dust here.
Category Archives: words
teared steering
Last night, I ask her what she was thinking. She replied, “this is the last time I will help decorate your parent’s christmas tree. This is the last time I will wish your mother a happy birthday.”
And we left soon after that and I wept and she wept and our daughter pointed out to us christmas lights and decorated storefronts and she muttered, “yes, we see them.”
And I choked and held onto the steering wheel and covered my mouth and wiped my tears and barely got us home.
lost, he says.
The other day the therapist was really making it a point about how I wasn’t contemptible, using my thoughts and feelings as examples, and the next day, when I was pretty much determined to blow the session, he said to me, “u know, I’ve been thinking of another word to describe how u are feeling that isn’t broken or damaged.”
“Lost”, he says, “You are lost.”
Although he is right, it’s nothing new. And just like someone lost in the woods or a city, they try one direction for a few steps or even miles, then head back and start again, or abruptly pitch off into another angle. They end up in circles, grope for what’s familiar or, in turn, embrace desperately something new. But in the end, lost is lost, and I have no direction to follow, I have no guide, no one to rest on, to carry any of this for me. And I am tired. I am tired of being this way, of being this flawed, of beating myself up and feeling much too much to the point where I am defeated and numb. I am tired. I am sick of the sight of me, I am tired of the stench.
a fiction of you: the tearing down
I turn to this, to writing in the dark, in the pale light of the screen because it is all I ever had, ever will have, all that I have at this moment. You have been gone for years and a smattering of months. My hands rest on the keyboard, defeated and alone. You will never read this, I will never see your face again as I remember it, as I have written it here. We lost so much and it was all my doing, the making and unmaking, the building and the tearing down.
a ficiton of you: hesitant to breach the earth below
At night, after he’s eaten and tried to get through the news (a terrorist attack in Mumbai, the president elect announces his cabinet, the market plummets), he doesn’t even attempt to write again. He cannot. He remembers the girl, the wave in her hair and the boy laughing hysterically. Did he ever laugh like that? His shoulder radiates an echo of pain not necessarily from the bone. He thought of her voice on the answering machine, he wants to hear it again but he cannot. Outside the soft staccato of rain, a shower hesitant to breach the earth below.
waiting room
Sitting in the waiting room. Always waiting, waiting for what? Just waiting, Waiting for Godot, for some sort of arrival, some sort of departure, waiting for rain, waiting to die, waiting to live, waiting, waiting, waiting. Hold your breath. and it’ll burst out of your chest, it’ll ravage you, punish you, floor you, leave you gasping just when you thought you didn’t want to take another
word machine
Everyday, have this at least, despite the sorrow and sadness, have this at least, this measure of you, this ounce, hang onto to this at least believe in this at least, not your failures, not the disappointment of who you are, just this, hang onto this, the words and the pain, the loss and the dispersal, this vital act of simultaneous becoming and disappearing: this is who you are, the congregation and dispersal, the want and the lack, the focus point, the sieve of despair, the void come to life.
steps towards anything
after every utterance, you see a contemptable person would be like this or that but not like you. and i get it, he’s trying to alleviate the guilt, the “intense” guilt and regret i feel, that i feel intensely, and he wonders aloud if the running i do, where i tap into it, this fucking sea of sadness, if i’m also literally running away, and i say no, i say it in my heart, i say no, i have never run away, i have always walked away or turned away, after all these years i have found myself having gone nowhere, i have always been right where i started and the bones have calcified, all these years and i haven’t taken any steps towards anything at all.
self suture
our capacity to demand, for reassurance, for justice, for hope, endless, unbound, always thrown in the face of someone else. we expect reciprocation, we expect a volley in return, we expect to hear the tenor of sincerity, we expect like for like, love for love, hope in return for despair, we demand and rend and tear and claw until we get something, not just anything, but that which belongs to us, that mirrors, a pound of flesh for kindness, sutures for this wound.
germ
Even pebbles add up to boulders, shaky as they are. You make the effort, mountains out of molehills, a pile of whispers into conversation. What matters is the steady pace, even if at a crawl. It all amounts to something, it all adds up. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or a magnum opus, everything big starts out tiny. even the body succumbs to a virus.