He told me that pain was just releasing weakness.
“And now? How does it feel?”
“better.”
That’s right, he said. It’s always better after.
Countless burns and strained muscles and broken bones all feel better after. Organ level problems. Drink a glass of water and move on with your life. You have to power through and it’s your fault if you can’t handle it.
But what about infection?
What about the illnesses that are rooted in the cells, at a level no one can see? The illnesses that spread and take over and become you?
There’s only one solution.
You have to destroy whatever it touches.
No cure.
Only prevention.
——-
people love to make promises. to buy into the idea that if you try hard enough, everything will work out. that if they say something, they’ll believe it. they stay blinded by the light, while true reality lies in darkness.
and the reality is- everything matters. life is so much more than one dimension. life is plane after plane of details and concepts and systems moving around. balancing. constantly shifting in order to add the puzzle that creates the picture of our perspective. things will slip through the cracks. the difference between a magnet zapping to a piece of metal and staying still is no more than a centimeter.
—
i laid there, knowing sleep wouldn’t come. but i was to be patient, to ride out the wave. so i put my hand on my stomach and i sighed and i looked up at the ceiling and I waited.
a door opened, and in marched five words dressed in a black and white prison jumpsuit and red heels. they grinned and struck me with their blood-soaked axe and in came a sudden, painful sting of clarity.
I wish i was dead.
—-
the moon looks perfect. iridescent. like you’d see in a movie. it sits dead center in a patch of midnight blue in a sea of black, layered with clouds of varying opaqueness.
their jaw chatters, and not from the cold.
—-
The risks just keep slipping out of my grasp. They’re usually much more solid than that, but i can’t fucking hold on to any of them. Every what if is answered with a certainty that it’ll be fine, because it’s him. Which doesn’t make any fucking sense, because i’m pretty sure he’s the one who could hurt me the most, even more than myself. Even though he convinces me he never will. but he could. it doesn’t make any sense.
——
maybe i didn’t mean as much to you as i thought i did.
leaving is ok. i know what it’s like to be left.
i’m used to it. i have a script and a structure and i can do it well. it’s how you made me feel so special one day and so unwanted the next.
i was fine before you. independent. maybe even happy. then you show up, uninvited and welcome, and you flip the switch the system of fairy lights in my nerves. you start my heartbeat. then you left with all my colors and i can’t move.
i want to say something.
“i’m sorry” or perhaps “fuck you”. i wanted to make you know that i let you in in a way that no one else has known me, and you abused that position of power. but no no no. my heart still wants to say “hug me please, please, and we can forget it all”.
or maybe i want to say “i forgive you. you’re not sorry but i still forgive you”.
i will live my life alone. when they ask about you i’ll brush it off in the best way i know. i will tell strangers we loved each other but it wasn’t enough for him. i will say i hope that you are happy and that i understand why i could never have you. i will smile and tell them i’m okay.
because they won’t watch closely.
they won’t see how i have to take a deep breath when your name comes up. how i have to laugh to cover up how my voice shakes when i talk about who you are were. how when they turn their backs my shield will drop.
i will live my life and i will tell people that i do not love you anymore, but my heart will beat just a little bit faster when those words leave my mouth because it knows i am a liar.
——
distance will swallow us for breakfast one day
chase us down it’s wicked throat with a glass of orange juice
us, with our tear-streaked cheeks and our cherry-stained lips
our tragedy-stricken hearts and sugared teeth.
we craft metaphors of our pain, build something breathtaking out of the rubble.
we twist our words to heal our hearts and romanticize all the things that hurt us, but love
that there’s nothing pretty to see here.
nothing beautiful about how even though we see the same sky
there’ll always be another 3 hours in between us
another three months until we feel the sun kiss our skin in the same old town.
it’s christmas and we’re still sitting at the low table,
even though our bodies have outgrown our old clothes and our scraped knees are hitting the underside of the wood.
we’re too young to be this sad, and yet
we still take stupid risks
(go on, tell him)
we still get excited over little things
(remember the scholastic book fair?)
we still live and kiss and cry and breathe
(we can’t help it. we’re human)
i know your mother told you to never swim on a full stomach and i know the waters cold
but your lungs are filled with all the things you’re too afraid to say
and you can’t afford to wait 20 minutes because this time there’s gonna be love,
so much that you’re gonna drown in it
“kids these days think theyre invincible”
we’ve heard it a million times.
we know.
——
“what is your deal with them?”
in theory, it’s a simple question, and it’s one that he knows the answer to, so it has no right sticking in the throat the way that it is, practically choking me. my deal with them is this: we trust each other just as readily as we hurt each other, thoroughly and unconditionally and more than anyone else in the world. this is something that is easy to say, hard to understand, and impossible to live without. it’s a nonsensical and non-negotiable ebb and flow that only we can tread water in, but we don’t know anything else, so we keep swimming.
sometimes, i think i’m tired or swimming. sometimes, i think i’d die if i had to get out of the water. what i know, though, is that they feel the same way, and that’s why we carry on.
——
sometimes, i feel that all the work i do to try and get better and progress opens up a web of different problems. my intense, jumping from 1 to 100 side needs to tick off a box as soon as i fix a problem, but the problem usually isn’t gone. the main concept might be recognized, steps might have been changed, but my flaws are infections. they spread quick and deep and invisible through my roots and i have to go through and hand cut them out.
infections.
the advancement of medical education and equipment has led to a huge change in the way we’re able to treat problems in the body. not as much with infections.
there are three steps with infections. 1)prevention- routinely cleaning a wound and taking care of it. 2) antibiotics- when you first find out about the infection, you might be able to catch it and kill it in time with these. if it doesn’t fight back and win. 3) the third step. if infection spreads, it presses into the core of what something is. the only way to get rid of it is to cut the poisoned part off.
in the olden days, sure, they didn’t have pain meds so you had to bite a bullet while they sawed your leg off- but it’s the same idea. now, it’s just a little more cushioned. sugarcoated.
i don’t have to energy to go through and cut off the poisoned parts of all my roots. the bonds i can’t have. all my problems i haven’t been dealing with spread and take up my energy. the ones i have tried to fix, to push back to, have simply adapted and grown under the pressure to become something new and hard and unstoppable.
——
my relationships with people suck because of me.
they just exist, and i can’t take it. it’s all games of who has value because of what, of who will do what for me, of how can i make myself useful. wanted.
i’m wired wrong. i’m not meant to exist here, in this space, in this world. i make bad choices to cope, and the bad wiring slips out the cracks of me even when i’m spending so much time creating a barrier. a wall to hold it back, a wall of asphalt and dried blood and whatever else i can find. dried blood. when the party’s over, i guess.
it slips through the cracks. i make a mess and i just wait for the people who like me, love me,
the ones who are supposed to know me value me to pick up the pieces. the ones i collected. manipulated. whatever you want to call it. i wait for them to come do what i expect for what i pay them. the cost is in time, energy, tears. whatever i have on me. my pocket change is lies and compliments.
it’s transactional- loans and debts. i can’t take thinking of it any other way.
sometimes i think that all the work i’ve done to take down obvious barriers and to loosen up just removes what’s in your line of sight first. the big, easy stuff. all 1-dimensional. all my emotional problems and walls are still there, just better hidden.
—-
people don’t understand the word ruthless.
they think it means “mean.”
it’s not about being mean. It’s about seeing the bright, clear line that leaves from point a to point B. The line that goes from motive to means. Beginning to end. It’s about seeing that bright, clearly not caring about anything for the beautiful fact you could see the solution. Not caring about anything else but the perfection of it.
——
by the middle of the week, i am tired of being a person. so on thursdays, give me space to die a little in private. i don’t want to go to my homework, fold laundry, or cut up cucumber for dinner. let me sit quietly in a room alone with my knees folded to one side. i will retreat into myself, where i have resided obscurely through immeasurable and contrasting lives, all disorganized and stacked on top of each other in the pit of my stomach. sometimes, they spill out of my mouth like a sheet of ice because of you and your nagging fingers pulling at my bottom lip, hungry for me to tell you what i think before i know how to say it.
—-
he calls my name and smiles, and i can’t help but wonder- how long will it take before it’s gone? for the parasite in my heart to stop squirming the second i see him? my hand clasps around the railing but it feels like a knife, sharp enough to draw blood. i wonder if i’d bleed purple. i wonder if when my bones struck the blade, they’d ring like a gong. it sits in the yearning cavern of my stomach, that’s what it does. something bright and golden and sharp. he’s shining, clean, in dimensions i can’t access. and i am bloody and dull and it’s all coming together now, faster than before, and my heart squeezes in sharp edges and soft curves.