Maybe

            Maybe it started off really simple. Maybe it didn’t take a lot of acid to digest. Maybe you were too young to think about it, too young to analyze it. It’s probably true that every child is too young to handle the first real problem that they encounter. Maybe if you had been protected from it, you wouldn’t even be you. Maybe if we had been protected, you wouldn’t be reading this.

            Maybe it was a divorce. Maybe Dad left, maybe Mom did, maybe it was one of those rare mutual agreements that aren’t actually any less ugly. (If you look under the floorboards of strained amicability, you’ll still find rotting corpses of promises; they’ll smell strongly of dead romance.) Maybe he hit her. Maybe she cheated on him. Maybe they just looked at each other with disdain instead of desire for one hour too long for both their withering patiences. Maybe they felt themselves becoming just like their own parents and they were afraid.

Maybe what happened was, someone hurt you. Maybe you had a bruised face, maybe you had a bruised body, maybe you had a bruised ego, a bruised innocence, a bruised soul. Maybe they touched you. Maybe they called you words that you still call yourself. Maybe what happened was, they broke you. There was something in your brain that used to tell you that you needed to be protected, that you were supposed to be protected, that you deserved to be protected, but maybe you were too weak to protect yourself and no one else was going to do it. Maybe this made you believe that you weren’t worth the trouble. Maybe that instinct in your brain, protective instinct, human instinct, cracked in two, and neither superglue nor self-help has ever been able to repair it.

Maybe your whole life, all you’ve wanted was to separate yourself from the misery that made up your shaky, cracked foundation. Maybe your whole life, all you’ve wanted was to be happy. Maybe your every waking moment, you’re bent a little out of shape, your jagged form pointing in the direction that it wants to go, your crooked legs not knowing how to get there, your crooked mind unable to find the time to ask for directions.

Maybe you’ve been doing everything you can. Maybe you’ve tried the only way you know how. Maybe you’re coping, maybe you’re dealing. Maybe all you’ve been able to do in there is deal. Maybe your way of dealing never gave anyone at the table a balanced hand of cards.

            Maybe somewhere in the rearview, you started smoking this thing, shooting that thing, snorting the other thing, drinking whatever, dropping whatever, taking whatever. Maybe you started to become uncomfortable if something that wasn’t you, wasn’t made for you, wasn’t meant for you, wasn’t in your body. You needed it, wanted it, loved it, whatever it was, maybe as innocent as a beer or frivolous as a joint, maybe as sinister as a foil or angry as a needle. Maybe the point was to feel something. Maybe the point was to feel nothing at all. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe in the end it took you over, doubled you over, bent you over and had its way with you. Maybe it raped you and robbed you and racked you in the balls. Maybe it ostracized you. Maybe it killed your friends. But maybe you still sometimes wonder, when you look back on your memories, where your personality ended and the substances began. Maybe you still don’t know how to be happy without it. Maybe when you learned to walk as a man, as a woman, as a grown-ass person, maybe you learned to do it back then with a crutch. Maybe now you just limp, but your legs are so tired.

Maybe you’re not eating. Maybe your self-hatred has become horribly behavioral. Maybe you find poetry in the sight of your own bones. Maybe you’ll never be able to forget that a carrot stick is six calories and a grape is only three. Maybe the toilet became your very closest confidante somewhere along the line. Maybe you’re still not done with it, haven’t broken up with it. Maybe every day poses the question of if you’ll ever be perfect enough to deserve the perfection you desire.

            Maybe you have voices, voices that are not your own, reverberating consistently from the inside out of your mind. You don’t know where they came from, but they have made neighborhoods in your neuron-paths. Their kids ride their squeaking tricycles around in small circles while they yell up at you exactly everything that is wrong with you. Maybe they call you things you’ve been called before. Maybe they call you things you’ve only heard in movies. Maybe they’re the ones convincing you that you don’t deserve this happiness you chase. Maybe a war is always being waged inside of you, no matter how calm the surface is, a volcano slowly rumbling at the floor of the morning’s glassy-faced sea. 

            Maybe you are in love with the idea of being in love. Maybe you fell in love with a flesh-and-blood human somewhere in this thought process. Maybe you gave that person every ounce of effort and every piece of your spirit that you could fit into your hands at the time. Maybe it was everything. Maybe they took it soberly and returned the favor in kind. Maybe they stashed it under their bed and paid you in badly-made counterfeit bills. Maybe they left you with a venom-filled phone call about your shortcomings. Maybe it was more of a slow drift, the seasons changing, the leaves falling without pretense to the ground. Maybe you can’t believe the amount of pain that a heart can feel when it’s dropped back off in your chest, a long drop down a raw throat from hands you thought would hold it forever. Maybe you’ve repeated the process a couple of times, maybe more than a couple. Maybe your heart has more fingerprints on it than you’d want to have it dusted for. Maybe there are pieces of it still missing.

            Maybe all you wanted was to be wanted. Maybe it wasn’t their eyes you were looking at, the intricate waves of color and refractions of light. Maybe what grabbed you was the reflection of yourself in their eyes, that look on your face like you belonged there, watery in a glass more overlooking of your flaws than of the bathroom mirror on lonely mornings in the sunlight.

            Maybe you’ve been looking for that one, waiting for somebody to make you somebody by loving you, loving you completely, wholly, loving you forever. Maybe when you choose the ones that don’t love you, you cling to them like a sailor to the drift-wood off a wrecked ship. Maybe some of them have used you, taken whatever they wanted, shut the door behind them with a fuller stomach and a better self-esteem to face the sunrise, and left the husk of you behind, sallow-skinned and sunken-eyed with a quarter bottle of whiskey on the floor of your own home. Maybe some of them, you meant nothing to them. Some of them, they just got caught up in you for a while. Some of them were too young or too erratic, too irresponsible, too easily bored, too wrapped up in their uh, wife, husband, or their job, or their plans, their big plans that they needed to skip to without you alongside.          

            Maybe all of this has been lost on you, your searching for a feeling, for perfection, for love. Maybe for a while you’ve been trying to search for the real thing. What is the real thing? Why do you feel so completely incomplete at every turn, with every change, every change that you fear and every change that you embrace? Why do you look at your face in the reflective windows you pass on the street, surprised at its age, at its darkness, at its exhaustion? Why do you chase the same white rabbits expecting them to take you down different holes? Do you sabotage every good thing that comes to you? Does your skin crawl once you reach a place of true stability? Maybe you are uneasy, you feel like all this cannot be true, cannot be yours, and so you resort to arson. Every relationship drenched in gasoline, every job drenched in gasoline, every home drenched in gasoline, and you set the match of self-loathing onto the pile pretending that freedom is what you really want. Maybe only moments after the ashes have finished falling, you find yourself on the ground, your cheek all too familiar with this feeling of pavement. Maybe what you wanted was freedom, but when freedom came to you and settled into your chest, maybe you suddenly wanted safety again. A pair of arms to hold you every night the same, a steady income to sustain you, a sun to wake up to and a moon to sleep to. Maybe you fight for it, tooth and nail, and then as soon as you get it, don’t you just burn it all down all over again? Maybe you don’t think that you deserve it. Maybe you don’t feel like it’s real. Maybe you don’t feel like you’re real. But what is real?

            Maybe you are searching for the real thing. What is the real thing? Maybe you are wandering after it like a missing puzzle piece. Your soul is incomplete, your brain still broken. You think you’ve been wandering as far as you can, but maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you’ve been sitting in one place with a blindfold on, always believing it when they told you that there were four walls around you that you could not move beyond. Maybe you took what was handed to you, the coping mechanisms they thrust upon you, the demonic voices they placed in your head to tell you who you are and what it is that you deserve. Maybe you need to reach up and take off the damn blindfold. Maybe you need to question what they told you was true about you, true about your life, true about your containment. Maybe you’ve got it all wrong. Maybe recklessness is not youth, and maybe stagnancy is not adulthood. Maybe love does not chain you. Maybe love sets you free. Maybe there are no walls, no rules for you. You’ve been sitting in an open space all along. There is freedom to be found. Take up your mat and walk; you are healed. Maybe you need to move on.

            Maybe now you’ll just be walking, walking through the desert. Freedom takes away the boundaries at the border of your body, but you still need direction, and you still need to learn to walk without your crutch. You still need to reach forward to touch the hand of God. Maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe nothing else is worth it. Maybe everything else will fall into place in time. Maybe all you can do is go forward, go confidently, still wondering when the lines will show themselves and lend form to what you’re reaching for, form to the brilliant, elusive colors blending into themselves in the sky.

Glass Mind

Frighteningly fragile, apologetic porcelain, complexity of mind like a hedge maze with walls of glass, if you drop me I break, I’ve already cracked a billion times, super glue holds me together, glass has a funny way of not healing. Grey days, lonely days, silence reverberating from the ceiling days, they put a melancholy on me like a heavy weight on my chest and I…can’t…breathe… Find a door, find a window, gust of wind, a conversation, daydreams of New York City where I would never be alone, too many strangers, and strangers are far better than the monsters getting louder as their nails scrape the maze-walls between the sides of my breaking skull.

A Little Rhyme, For You

I miss you as soon as you walk out the door

Like I missed you the day you wrote “the key is yours”

I’m writing vows in my brain probably years in advance

Thinking in circles around our fate and random chance

I swear I’ll always stay pretty, and always love your tattoos

I’ll use discretion in my methods when you’re getting the blues

We’ll drink whiskey on the porch, once I’m drinking again

And we’ll talk like we’re lovers, talking like they’re friends

We’ll never fall asleep angry, since we’re both nightmare-prone

But if you do have a bad dream, at least you won’t be alone

I feel luckier than everyone, though my rhyming is shit

Because I found the one drug I’ll never want to quit

You’re the piece I like best of my own twisted soul

The best of the two halves that make up this whole

Coming home to you’s a dream I never thought would really start

And when I look at you I see you, but I also see my heart

Smoky-Teal

           Afraid of the ever-growing-in-numbers strong-like-a-cheap-scotch opinions of others, I began to lay awake at night doing what old women with anxieties do: I was fucking knitting. Yes, with needles. I am indeed being literal. I became morbidly addicted to the noise and comforting pattern, the way that the formula never changed, when I was maybe twenty-two years old.

            At first I wanted this to be productive. I decided that the first thing I really wanted to do was make a scarf for my girlfriend, who slept casually beside me, grunting in her dreams while I laid on my stomach with a ball of yarn held between my boobs and the bed. Her favorite color was “smoky-teal.” She was better about that kind of shit than me, that color shit, so I didn’t really know what that color was. I settled with silver and…some shade of greenish. I couldn’t think of what else she could have possibly meant by “smoky-teal,” but she had a way of making me feel clueless about almost everything. Not in a mean way, really. She was just louder about what she was smart about than I could ever make myself be.

            So anyway, I knit Phoebe this scarf. I wanted her to like it a lot. I wanted her to be happy that I had made her something. I tried to think of her with every careful slide of the needle and wrap of the yarn. I tried to think of how much I loved her. Of her wearing the scarf with her grey wool peacoat in the winter, her long black hair all up in a bun the way I liked, her nose all red and cold, her breath hanging in the air right along with all her complicated words.

            The smoky-teal scarf ended up being too fat for her little neck, a nearly-dilapidated amateur mess. Phoebe still jumped on me when I presented it to her, literally jumped on me. She was a very enthusiastic woman. She wore it every day that winter. We didn’t even argue for a good week after I gave it to her.

            All those ever-growing-in-numbers strong-like-a-cheap-scotch opinions of others kept coming though. So I kept thinking too much. So Phoebe and I never really could stop arguing for long.

            With Phoebe, it always went like this:

            “Why aren’t you talking to me?”

I would stare back at her blankly. “Well…what is there to talk about, baby?” I would ask.

            “Jesus. Never mind then,” she’d say, and get all huffy and snappy, and quiet herself.

            See, when I’m quiet, it means I’m thinking, usually. When Phoebe’s quiet, you’d better bet she’s just trying not to cry.

            As you can imagine, this caused a lot of misunderstanding between the two of us.

            “Well why can’t you just tell me what you’re thinking then?” she would ask, her big blueish eyes completely awash with sincerity. The woman was almost always way too fucking sincere.

            I would stay up at night, unable to sleep. I would think about how my mother was dying of intestinal cancer, but she didn’t want me to visit her, not until I renounced my horrible sin and went to therapy and dumped Phoebe and tried to be friendly with some good men. And I would think about how I was already in therapy, how my ruddy-faced shrink and I were working on my feelings about my alcohol problem, which I couldn’t quite own up to, after all I was still so young and didn’t I have the right to a good few every now and again? And I would think about Phoebe lying there innocently when I came in at three a.m. some nights, sliding under the covers still reeking of vodka and smoke, feeling guilty for just not feeling guilty and then barely looking at her for days afterwards. And I would think about how the money had been low since I got demoted last year, and I would think about Christmas and what would I buy for Phoebe and how horrible is it that I can’t spend the holidays with my whole gay-hating family?, and I would think about how I hadn’t gone to the gym in weeks, god damn it, and how annoyingly needy the woman I loved was and how much less she had cried when we first really fell for each other…then I would look down and realize I’d finished rows and rows on some new awful scarf, and I would feel like maybe my thoughts had accomplished something.

            So really, I couldn’t tell Phoebe what I was thinking. Because it was too long to explain and too awful to go into. I didn’t want to talk about it, is all.

            I forgot, completely, my original plan to think of her with every careful slide of the needle and wrap of the yarn. And the scarves, you would think that they would get better with time, but they progressively got blobbier, uglier, worse.

            Phoebe did cry a lot but still, she wore that ugly first scarf I had made her every day.

            One night I came home, it was later than usual, maybe four a.m., and I went into the kitchen to make myself a bacon sandwich. I was stumbling and muttering. I screamed a little, some exclamation, some “Holy shit!” remark, when I looked up and saw her, this terribly needy woman that I loved, already sitting on the counter, looking at me with reproach, her eyes puffy and exhausted, she had been crying of course.

            “Why don’t you love me like you used to?” she asked. Blunt and to the point.

            “What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked. Evasive. I had no point. She started to cry in earnest. I felt myself getting hot and uncomfortable. I hated watching her cry.

            “Why are you fucking crying?” I asked. Angry. I listened to my voice sounding angry though I really didn’t want it to, but god damn it Phoebe I didn’t know how to be much else back then, please forgive me, mea culpa, my fucking fault.

            “Because of everything,” she said simply. And I, frustrated, drunk, exhausted, turned off the kitchen light, leaving her in the dark. And I, afraid, stupefied, clueless, fled to the living room, fell onto the sofa, and fell asleep.

            A few days later, I realized she had still been wearing the scarf. Every day. The December cold still made her nose red. She still wore her hair in the bun that I liked. The smoky-teal whatever yarn was becoming wild in a few patches. She still came home from work every day and kissed my forehead with heavy, heavy sadness dripping from her lips.

            I still couldn’t talk to her. And she just stopped trying to talk to me.

            I realized one night, while I was knitting this petrifyingly ugly scarf in some Dorito-puke-orange hue that I would never give to anyone, that Phoebe was right. I didn’t love her like I used to. And the fact that she was right really didn’t surprise me. But the fact that she knew me better than I did made me afraid of her.

            I watched her breathe while the needles moved, I looped the yarn, crossed the needles, looped the yarn again.

            I had made a habit of doing everything I fucking could to never have to explain to her anything about me that she didn’t already know. Because I was afraid.

            I watched her breathe while the needles moved, I looped the fucking yarn, crossed the fucking needles, looped the fucking yarn again.

            The next day, I took all the fucking scarves, the big long messy snakes of garish colors, out to the dumpster by our building. With each individual silly crafty product of my anger being rolled up and thrown into the trash, a thought of how things used to be with the woman I loved would involuntarily come to my mind: The flowers I used to pick for her in good humor from the parks, and the way she used to get when I walked in the door and how I always reciprocated without thought every kiss and smile and hello and squeeze, and the way I used to feel when we made love, the way that she could wake up a fire in me within seconds, the way I always felt so satiated afterwards, like we had both shared ourselves, our whole selves, our very souls and cores and…

            I threw the last fucking scarf in, a pink one, I hated pink, and wondered why I felt like I no longer had a core, why I felt like I no longer had a soul.

            We had been together a little over a year, I guess, on the day that I told her it had to end.

            “You’ve always deserved better than this,” I struggled to say.

            “I know,” she sighed, tearing up a little through some I-know-everything smirk. She looked me dead on and I squirmed under her gaze.

            “But I always wanted you,” she said. Sincerity. She wasn’t really crying.

            I felt guilty for not feeling guilty when she packed her things and drove away.

            I saw her the other day at a café in uptown. She cut her hair in a bob. She probably couldn’t fit it into a bun anymore. I watched her carefully, dismayed at the feeling in my stomach of everything collapsing onto itself, of a hunger that food was never going to quite satisfy, of the ever-growing-in-numbers strong-as-a-cheap-scotch opinions of others fading away in importance, of needing her so badly, of my soul awakening, of my mouth wanting to taste the two uncomfortable cottony syllables of her name. And for the first time in, who knows how long really, I thought for sure that I was going to cry.

            She turned toward me just so, and stopped. She was staring right at me for the first time in nine months. She looked at me with terrifying dignity and silence, staring first into my eyes, then into my hands.

            I was holding a vodka tonic and a cigarette, and it was two in the afternoon a few weeks before Thanksgiving, and she shook her head with her eyes hidden behind exhaustion, and she turned on her heel and walked out the front door of the café with anger about her I had never seen before.

            I thought of that night I turned off the kitchen light on her before realizing, with interest, that Phoebe was wearing her smoky-teal fucking scarf. I guess I was so used to seeing her in it that I hadn’t even noticed. And I didn’t know how else to feel, so I just drank the vodka tonic and sat there at the table with nothing making any sense at all.