Thomas Wolfe Might Have Been Wrong

You can go home again.

"I've shed selves since then, like a snake sheds skin" she said, her eyes whipping past me. I nod and agree but say only "I allowed it to happen, I made the choice, and live with it even now."

"What?" The question a Rubik's cube.

The answer is out of me before I can close my mouth, it has slipped past, and unfurls like flag. "I have always always loved him."

In the perfect world, I'd have fallen to the ground, my eyes rolling back, the shivering seizure taking the truth of it from me. She'd have been struck deaf by god, if he'd been kind. I should have let out a scream that went on till I coughed blood, I'd have torn my hair and thrown myself on the pyre of the past.

Instead

the miles keep flying by, the forest is not the skeletons of char after a fire, the sky blazes blue instead and I close my eyes and cover them with my hands.

There is a creeping joy in knowing, and now I do know. "I could never tell him no" I whisper. "I have looked for him always, and defined and redefined love by what he had to offer, though it was so much less than love."

She is silent, then a small burst of laughter, like a child.

"Now what?"

Waiting

Where have I felt happiness?
I don't even know now what to seek, where to find it.

Joy slithers in

It's true - joy and fear all at once. So many changes in the works - a plan to travel beyond the distant horizons into dreams I've not yet dared to weave, a plan to sit in silence and pain for a number of days (dazed and mute, what will I think up?), and more even.

I watched a movie in which a delicate child, two months premature, died for lack of medical equipment. How can I not be moved to inflict some change of my own onto the world?

For TNB

I warn you, now wonder what his hands hurry to hide
I warn you now, beware the faulty fruit this love should bring
Eyes certain, will certainly stray
What warning would you have?
Build what you can from those fickle fibers
those half-laughed lines
I swear, give it time
and you'll choke with the lie

I bear you nothing but witness.
A heart as dark and sickly sweet
you'll find is filled with nothing
but raspberry jam.

For KL, because I have nothing else to offer.

I wonder what parts of myself I'll hide without even thinking. I wonder what I'll conceal and pretend, how much of myself I'll be able to swallow down or push away. I wonder what will slip out and what I'll sell.

I peel skin in layers, shedding whatever part of me I feel is attaching itself permanently. I wonder if you can even find something within me that is me, something solid within the gelatinous pulse that endlessly renews. I'm beginning to fear that there is no skeleton below, nothing hard and solid for you to grasp, nothing immobile to set your heart onto.

I wonder if disappointment will flutter ripe and willful through a heart borne onwards towards treachery. I wait, breathless, for the pale wash over your eyes, for the rush to speak, to cover what you first thought with a kind word.

I tread by an uncertain rhythm towards whatever fate has in mind for me. My heart and hands, endlessly calculating probabilities, the painful geometry of reality. I manage to convince myself that any possible outcome is, in fact, desirable.

I also wonder how much of the hunger for love is the longing for death. Because surely, what else makes me feel both more alive, more vibrant and flush and more dead, more wasted and gnawingly empty than love? Is it licking the grave or giving birth?

In an empty apartment -

I walk down the hallway, close the doors, turn out all the lights. The soft breath of the central heating sighs on. Otherwise, it is silent. I flip on a song or two every now and then, but the silence only seems more acute after they're over.

Sometimes I'm sure I live with a ghost, or maybe I occasionally slip into an alternate universe. They say it's easier than you might imagine, one wrong step and a new horizon blossoms out of the old, or this reality simply slips away out of the corner of your eye. Your voice, the incandescent incantation, breathes life into the transparent figment I conjure. And you are there, in a bright burst of hope and color. I know it would be too much to ask you to stay.

So you go, with a hiss like electricity, you slip away.

Picking through the pieces...

And trying to find the best. The ginkgo is an orphan, did you know that? Last of it's kind. Such a lonely beauty in that.

A while ago I saw a friend who hadn't realized how things had ended and she asked about you, her face as innocent and open as a silver dollar. How easy it was to smile and say it was for the best. I still reach for you in an empty room, but it's better this way. I hear your voice when the telephone rings; this is best for everyone. The world we created drifted away as easily as dust, you can't want any more than that. In my mind, I reach across an empty table to feel your collarbone like the strange sculpture of a wild genius; this is better, much better.

In Which I Grow Tired of the Wingman

We sat around the table and traded "I was drinking at a party and hooked up with this boy...and here's the silly story" and the only one I had to tell was how I lost a good friend because he was later embarrassed to have been seen as going with the unattractive girl. And I'm still that girl. We were out tonight at a great place, and an adorable Australian man introduces himself to us to get to my friend. And I realized I'm the unattractive friend again. And I get over it by being sarcastic, funny, stupid, and trying to get her to take his card (thinking maybe something good can come out of it, at least a nice date for a friend who needs a nice time). And I realize I'm being too over the top, embarrassing her, and pointlessly encouraging a nice man to get his feelings hurt because she's not into him.

So yeah, that's me. Not-quite-right. Never quite right. Often the least attractive girl at the bar. Always the girl the wingman takes. Not sometimes, all the time.

I know how you look is important, but I thought that at some point, it'd be less important.

I heart Tricky & PJ Harvey

They never built a life.

My parents never seemed to build a life together. For as far back as I can remember, they only stumbled through, days and years passing without a meaning, without any sort of message to their children desperately searching, asking.

My mother became depressed, I think she started to see it for what it was - living without kindness, without love, without reason, art and beauty.

My father, even now, sees it every now and again, but pushes it away. It's too hard to think so much has been wasted by thoughtless cruelty.

A friend once asked me what my childhood was like. I hadn't been keeping it a secret; it's finally starting to fade. I turned my heart inside out trying to explain it to someone who'd been well-loved, then left it as one word - fear.

My sister and I spent a night a few weeks ago trading stories. Only two years apart, and our experiences were so different. I told her about the early morning orthodontist appointment, trying to explain exactly how I fell in such a way as to drive my braces into my cheek, almost as though I'd been hit.

There were four of us, four children now adults, all still listening for what we never heard, what we never felt when we were young.

The oldest searching, always, for approval, seeking some sort of reward for self-denial. Like her father, endlessly critical, impatient with any fault. She looks for god because the gods of her childhood disappointed her so thoroughly.

Myself, the youngest girl, at 27, an uncertain lover, still asking "Can you love me?" , but always sure of the real answer. Taught to hate myself so completely, I can't bear the scrutiny of being wanted.

The oldest boy, now a bitter, confused manchild. Blame and anger seeps from every pore, and he deadens it with drugs, with danger.

The baby, he was never able to harden his soft spirit, so he pushes himself further and further away with every passing moment to save his heart, and seek his own approval.

I haven't lived with my father in more than a dozen years. How long do I live in the shadow of a childhood that should evaporate, pass like smoke through me? Now I reinvent myself, turning every fear into a question, asking, always asking, how to make a life of meaning and love. The best I've come up with is to tell myself not to waste any time telling people how unbelievably perfect and deserving of love they are. I try to let anger be only an experience, and kindness the rule. What else do I have?