We Melt Together Like Grilled Cheese

Your idiosyncrasies are health to my atoms. My electrons whir with the noise of a ghetto-rigged toaster making sideways grilled cheese. Things have changed because we changed them. I have changed because of you. I am the noises you make. I belong to the looks on your face. When you have nightmares, I have nightmares. The more we melt together, the more I find of myself. 

Frankly, I can't say I'd be nothing without you. I'd be something. Something like a vegetable. Stagnant and bored, I'd smell like glycerine and disappointment. Luckily you're still with me. You're still here and I still matter. I still buzz with your electro-magnetism, and the toxic waste of our mistakes is too far down river to taste. 

No Fuhgiveness

I've seen him so many times, walking up and down these rough blocks on Larimer, singing low in a grumbly gospel baritone. He sings to the concrete, pointing at the sky. His words echo like a prayer at the wailing wall. 

"There's no fuhgiveness in Denvuh-town," he sings. "Never no fuhgiveness in Denvuh-town." 

---

The first time he asked me for some spare change, I tried to smile. "I don't have any cash on me, sir," I said. 

"SIR?" he laughed. "Sir is my father. You call me Bones, young lady. My name's Bones," and he took my hand and shook it. My whole damn arm flailed with his hand. I was dead-fishing the guy, my face in a tight, please-let-go-of-me stare. He went in for a hug, clap-on-the-back included, like he was welcoming an old friend. 

"Bones," he said again, his breath loud and stale in my ear. "Name's Bones 'cause alls I got left is my Bones." 

He laughed like that was the funniest joke he'd ever told, pointing at the sky again with a rot-tooth smile as he walked away. He sang it out, a deep cough interrupting his tune, "No there ain't NO fuhgiveness in Denvuh-town." 

---

For a good while, Bones gave me the creeps. Every time I saw him passing the windows near the restaurant I was bussing at, I would feel this sick twist in my stomach. I would remember that hug, that stenchy homeless man hug that left me feeling dirty for days afterwords, the way his big, dusty, cracked hand had enveloped my little one, and I would feel like he had gotten too close. Something about him had sunk into me, and I couldn't make it go away. 

---

Bones sleeps in what we call the Broadway triangle. Skinny white girls like me know not to walk in the Broadway triangle alone at night. The neighborhood around it is trying really hard to clean up. These trendy twenty-somethings keep moving in and moving up. Bars and breweries are making their home here, surrounded by the homeless. The cops that come into my restaurant tell me that the biggest problem in the Broadway triangle is crack cocaine. A sleeping-bag town thrives under the surface of this clean city, humming with desire, trading rock for food, trading rock for sex, trading rock for dignity. Old women, young men, black and white, all of them disheveled, creep through the alleys, covered in bruises and waiting for their ship to come. The local liquor store sells foil and those rose pipes more often then they sell liquor.

Across the street from that liquor store, these modern condos just got built. A woman stands on her patio, smoking a Parliment in thick sunglasses and manicured nails, watching people starving just two floors down. 

I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just saying it feels wrong. 

---

One time Bones was out by the dumpsters at the restaurant while I was taking out the trash. He was just sitting on the concrete, looking up at me with glassy eyes. "Whas a guy gotta do to get some love around here?" he asked. He staggered to his feet between me and the dumpster. My first thought was, he's going to hurt me. My second thought was, Bones would never hurt anyone. 

I stared at him and realized I wasn't scared. 

"Love is everywhere, Bones," I said, and I flung the trash bag over his head before I walked back inside.

---

"No fuhgiveness in Denvuh-town!" I hear it now and welcome the sound. I give Bones cups of ice water. I know he'll spend my dollars on drugs, but I give them to him too. 

Would Jesus give money to Bones? I guess I don't know. I just do what feels right.

Maybe my stomach sinks every time it happens, but I let Bones hug me every day now. 

---

They wander the streets with bugged out eyes. The rich sleep above and the poor below. At least it's warm these summer nights. When other people are grateful for the rain, I just worry about Bones and his sleeping bag.

They wander the street with missing teeth. People hand them spare change. They give them pity and cigarettes. "No fuhgiveness in Denvuh-town," he sings. He takes the money and he takes the high. He's grateful for what he gets, but he knows that death will find him before the love he wants ever has the chance. 

The Best Year

It's been almost a year now, but I remember last June 24 so clearly. I spent the morning meditating under a palm tree on Coranado Beach. Something felt off somehow as I sat there, seeking peace. I felt prompted by intuition to take a pregnancy test. I took three of them in a Von's bathroom in a rich neighborhood, and had to sit there staring at them for a long while before what I was looking at finally registered.

Not one pink line, but two. They were all positive.

The first person I called was my best friend Kesheya. I won't detail her response in full (she probably wouldn't appreciate it), but suffice it to say it didn't go so well. (Later she made up for her inital response by being my most trusted babysitter and frankly, Paige's favorite aunt.) The second person I called was my friend Kate. She had just found out a few months before that she was pregnant with her first child - and she had ten years of life experience on me. She calmed me down and talked me through my options as I sat on the pavement in front of the store. I remember how hot the weather was that day, the way my shoulders felt against the brick wall behind me. Every detail registered as significant as I felt the world changing around me, as I listened to Kate tell me what I needed to hear: That no matter what path I chose going forward, it didn't have to define me. The choice belonged to me and to no one else. No matter what I did, she said that she would love and support me through it.

What's funny is that much of my panic over being pregnant was so...artificial. Something very deep inside me had known somehow that I was pregnant essentially from the moment that Paige was conceived. I had been pushing the thought out of my mind for weeks, but somehow I think my body was preparing my mind for what was to come. My soul knew that I was pregnant before I did. It didn't really take me by surprise the way it should have. And even though I panicked like a champ - the way all the Degrassi kids did when they were pregnant, the way I felt that I needed to I guess, I honestly believe that I knew the second I saw the plus sign on that little plastic screen what I was going to do. I was going to be a mom. I was determined to keep this child.

Everyone I called that day to share the news with (always one to broadcast, never very private, I guess) had a very different reaction than the one I thought they were going to have. The most surprising was from my old college roommate, Lindsay. Lindsay is from Pueblo. She is no stranger to teenagers getting pregnant and often subsequentally ruining their lives. As an ambitious, career-minded, no-nonsense girl, I was pretty sure she was going to tell me to get my ass in a Planned Parenthood and stop even thinking about having babies for at least the next ten years. But she was the most excited for me out of anyone. "You're going to be an amazing mom, Shelby." She was the only one who ever said that to me before Paige was born. That phone call made me cry and I still love her for it.

A few people have questioned why I was so sure, HOW I was so sure, that this life is what I wanted.  It wasn't about a religious conviction. Continuing my pregnancy and keeping my daughter as my own was never based on any pre-conceived notions I had about what is right and what is wrong. I didn't keep my baby out of a sense of moral obligation or religious duty. I decided to keep her because I wanted her. I loved her and I knew her from the moment I was aware of her existence (and there was never a single doubt in my mind, by the way, that I was having a girl).

Here I am on the other side of so many important, life altering decisions. I can honestly say that I'm proud of myself for what I have accomplished, for the mommy that I am becoming. The last year of my life has been a whirlwind, and it has been incredibly hard, but it has also been by far the best year of my life. God has blessed me with a beautiful, healthy, daughter, a new career calling, and the healing and redemption of my relationship with a man that I am elated to call my other half and my best friend. As a parent, I have been imperfect. As a girlfriend, I have had my struggles. As a daughter, I haven't been grateful enough. As a friend, I've been irregular about returning calls. But at this moment, I'm looking back on the last twelve months of my life, and they seem...perfect. Everything came together like a puzzle. Jordan fits me like a favorite pair of jeans. Paige lights my world up every morning with her smile. And as we all press further into our future together, I can look back and see where God has been working. I can look forward and see how much promise there is to come. I am grateful for everything that I have, and more grateful than I realized I would be that I made the decision in that Von's bathroom to get on an Eastbound bus, go home, and start my life all over. 

God's grace has been sufficient. And I'm happier than I've ever been. 

Nutmeg

The kids these days are smoking nutmeg.

Can you believe it?
The things we won't do for a high.

Chasing dream clouds is a nice enough pastime, until the taste of all the smoke goes stale.

When burnt lungs want oxygen, they'll find it in a dying black balloon. It's personal but, I found mine in love.

The things we won't do for our fix.

I write my fix letters with a quill.
If you come back you'll be wonderful. If you come back I'll be beautiful. If you come back I'll let you lie to me again.

I'm not proud of this.

I've noticed, if you take your brag book photographs of all those seedy nights you thought you were happy, and you wave them hard enough, the wind will start a dust storm.

I see faded Polaroids of destruction where others see a Kodak moment. Then they point out the quill in my hand. The plank in my eye.

I guess I'm getting older.

I only use nutmeg in my lattes,
and even then, it's only a pinch.

Lucky Charms

I am the benchmark
I am evolution
I fight the fire with fire
Caffeine veins and stuffy noses
Nothing new under the sun
Meaningless changes
To the Lucky Charms in my bowl
Why the swirly moons?

You won't find better than me
Darling, rest assured
They won't love you like I did

This Dark Machine

I came unprepared for this undrinkable sea-water mixture of responsibility and still there it is, desire. Did I think I could wipe clean the slate that had driven me into the machine? I went in full of wonder and came out with all my bones broken. It was a fairground I went looking for I think, but what I found instead was the kind of one-and-a-half-sided Rubik’s-cube love story that made me profess, I’d rather take a closed-fist beating from him than ever live through that again. This dark machine surprised me, a carousel on fire like a phoenix, leaving no ashes for me to rise from, and I only had dripping wax wings to madly flap toward the sun with, and fall into the ocean, and sink, dragged by the weight of what could have been a lot of Yankee Candles. I always liked the buttercream one the best.

The World Was Lighter Than Eight Pounds

In that beeping, whirring factory, they set the weight of the world on my chest. The world was lighter than eight pounds. She was sighing in dreaming. The room, now shaking with exhaustion, was still anchored to the quaking earth by a solid reality, an air-solid reality, a new breath adding carbon dioxide to where stores of waiting life had just been. Perfection has been manifested here, the pain edged off by seventy five years of promise in my hands. Her big grey-blue eyes show me where to look. Her hand fits around my finger, points it toward the concrete above us. I know I must have never really loved before now, bleeding from our family ties, grateful even still that I was ripped open, open by a ray of sunshine that struggled to get out. The sky needed more sunshine more than it just needed more me.

Handfuls of Sunshine

From summer to autumn and autumn to winter, whenever I came across it, I would bring him little handfuls of sunshine. “Look what I found for you!” It was almost a daily occurrence. The dusty yellow would bleed into the grey air that he breathed. My excitement was always genuine. I was always trying to crack the code. How do you make someone love you? Some days he would smile. Some days he wouldn’t. Most days he would put me out. He always wanted to close the blinds.

Slowly, I learned that you can’t straighten enough hand towels or cook enough meals or apply enough coats of mascara to be good enough for anybody. You can’t write enough letters. You can’t strategize; love is not a chess game. You can’t simplify; love isn’t exactly checkers either. All you can do is expect the stars to come out every night. All you can do is expect the sun to rise every morning. You can breathe in, you can breathe out. You can take some of your sunshine and begin to keep it for yourself.

Maybe everything that I did was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t sunshine that he needed anyway. Maybe it’s better that we’re free from each other.

I can’t believe all that yet. My hands are still heavy-laden with the light I wanted to share with him. But maybe someday I will believe it. Maybe someday it won’t be so hard.

After the Storm

I look out over what’s left of us. Everything thrown back and into the wind by the storm. The valuables are shattered. The love letters are beyond repair. I’m digging through water-logged possessions in desperation. Is not one thing salvageable?

 “I tried to save it,” I hear myself say. “I tried, I tried, I tried. But it’s ruined.”

I look out over what’s left of us. Everything thrown back and into the wind by the storm. My skin crawls with bedbug lies. I sleep covered in six-legged nightmares. Everywhere I go, I feel them following in my shadow. Is not one place safe?

“I can’t live like this,” I hear myself say. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I will die.”

I look out over what’s left of us. Everything thrown up and into my lap by the storm. The pictures disintegrating in soppy, Technicolor rainwater. The ceiling dripping into my hopeless, clean hands. His hands are covered in blood.

“I love him,” I hear myself say. I feel myself shake with the thick silence that follows, the silence that says, But it doesn’t matter.

I look out over what’s left of us. I reach for the doorknob. The light is blinding. He doesn’t follow me. I walk away from his flood alone.