"I Wasn't Built for Safety"

I told myself I would never live for safety. I got it tattooed on my body. I wanted danger. I called it my “Danger-girl tattoo.” I wanted to be unconventional. I wanted exposed brick walls and hardwood floors. I wanted a typewriter, Marlboros, whiskey. I wanted to be a tortured artist, writhing in pain, pain registering as ecstasy. I wanted addiction, my demons, depression. I remember telling my first love that when we lived together someday, I wouldn’t need to take my medication anymore. He always knew how to talk me out of killing myself.

I was fifteen.

And I told myself a million times that I would never take the safe route. Fuck you, white-picket-fence American dream. I told myself that stability meant the death of my artist soul. A healthy love story demands stability and so I infused all mine with poison. Children demand stability so I swore I’d never have them.

I’m eating so many words I may as well swallow my tongue.

But now I see what I was for what she is; the Shelby I wanted to be and nearly was thought that she was living on the edge, but she was safer than her safe sex. She was the pussy. I am the brave one.

She hid behind the guise of drugs and alcohol so that she never had to deal with her problems. Her white picket fence was made of tramadol. Her American dream was avant-garde and so very Kerouac but it was still someone else’s dream for her. It was still a lie.

How much more dangerous is it to be used to erraticism, to use darkness as a comfort blanket, and then to cast those things off and refuse to be anything less than functional? I am afraid of functionality.

But I always wanted to go where I was afraid to go.

I wasn’t built for safety, and so I will be unsafe. Loving deeply is unsafe. Marriage is a gamble where you’re fifty two percent likely to lose everything. Having a child is dangerous as hell. Don’t tell me that hopping Greyhounds is more difficult. I’m taking on the most dangerous goddamn undertaking I ever thought I would take. It’s a danger involving plaster, carpet, baby gates, salaries, and fuck the part of me that tells me this means I’m a sellout, because if I can still bring forth explosive art from a serene, loving environment, then I’m less safe than I ever would have been doing what artists “just do.”

If I can bring tortured words from a happy soul, then I will have broken the code.

And that isn’t safe in the slightest.

I don’t feel safe at all.