"I believe you."

There are some things that words diminish, that are impossible to explain because even if you did, who would believe you? Even you don’t believe you, sometimes. Even you think (or hope, or pray) that you’re wrong, that you are not quite as empty as they’ve made you out to be, not so weary from the weight of your own skin. Barely thirty years old and ancient from what’s been done to you -- from what you’ve done to other people.

The most satisfying sentence in the English language is this: she got what she deserved.

You will always be like this, now, and you seek forgiveness for your fellow damned because you are simply too afraid to seek it for yourself.

You speak in riddles because no one can untie them. You watch the world as if through a skylight or a window, anything to make it fainter, more diluted, softer to the eye. You are every word they called you, every slur and every coy venomous promise, every wicked stereotype of what you’ve come to despise. Shame is a second skin. You wear it and you can’t find anyone else underneath.

Endearments terrify you; kindness is torture and scorn a balm. And within that reality there’s a deeper, more elusive truth: that there’s something-a-little-wrong-with-you, that maybe you enjoy this, that we derive pleasure from degradation precisely because we want to be punished; we want to see how strong and how vile we truly are. Dizzy with a lack of remorse, the knowledge that you simply can’t regret what you don’t remember. Of course they know this; they know everything, and they peel back your skin to press on every exposed nerve with a cold calculation that you absolutely admire. You’ve never honed your impulsivity, never edged it to a fine point, never weaponized your ruthlessness: and it’s easier to identify with your tormentors than to fear them.

Write it all down. Bleed it from you, and maybe you won’t look so fucking crazy.

Anger in an enclosed space is is a brilliantly-controlled explosion, and you turn this poison inward,wound yourself so beautifully and so thoroughly that you’ve actually convinced yourself you have no interest in harming anyone else.

toska

When you left so did I, and so maybe none of this matters. I still remember your face at the airport, moon-white and sharp, the downcast eyelashes lush with tears. You’d told me before that you shouldn’t have worn mascara, you should’ve known you’d cry - but I don’t think either of us knew it until the harsh lights refracted them in your wide blue eyes. You had one suitcase, a pillow, an overnight bag - I’d helped you lug the ancient thing through the airport. I don’t know how you managed to do that, to pack a single life away so effortlessly. They say no one touches us so lightly they leave no trace - but you were always a step ahead, around a corner, down the street, and I was always in your shadow.

I responded to your absence the only way I knew how: seeking to find someone who could carve a place inside me as you had. But as long as I waited, and as hard as I tried,  these strangers only shaped an emptiness that I couldn’t fill. 

I had you measured precisely as clockwork. I knew the way you pulled at your sooty lashes, how you hitched up the jeans on your thin hips, how dry your lips were when he kissed you. People are creatures of habit, so willing to walk the same paths over and over until the circles at last recede back upon themselves. I remembered when you had your dark hair - almost as dark as mine - shorn, how when you came to class I could see the tawny column of your neck, the freckles near the coil of your spine. It was frightening, strangely beautiful, your throat elongated and narrow, high and sunny-gold.

I remember. You were young and so was I, you the stranger that I’d always known. I asked you if you believed in reincarnation, souls rebirthing and souls passing on underneath the skein of heaven. Souls never dying. It was a strangely comforting thought. You said I wouldn’t have known you then - I said this wasn’t true. Maybe in some other lifetime we weren’t friends, but maybe we were something different. Maybe I was a cat, I said, a housecat that purred in warmth, who tilted her head in want of adoration. But you disagreed. I wasn’t a cat, you said, I was your sister, your mother. Your lover. I was something else. 

Now I medicate myself to sleep, two oblong pills tipped back with tepid tap water. I lie to you. I tell you that I’m sober, that I’m happy, that I found someone to fill the aching cavity you left behind. Your life is glossy like a magazine, jagged golden coasts and the water heartbreak-blue, the lovely and dangerous people of Los Angeles so endlessly fascinating to your new eyes. Forgetting is a form of forgiveness, I think. But I close my eyes and see on the backs of my eyelids a ghost etched in perfect color, that almost formless beauty, the eyes blue as summer. The fan of your lashes and the curl of your perfect nose. I can see your thin sunbrowned arms, the boys’ shirts you always wore, and - this is when my heart jumps into my throat - I hear your voice. Rough and lovely and low and hoarse. I try to shunt you away, close myself away - but the truth is that since you left all of my sins have looked just like you.

send no flowers

You took up more space within me than should have been allowed. That autumn the gray light broke through the trees and the cold arboreal land lay adrift in plumes of fog. Birds flooded the skies -- schools of warblers and goldfinches and crowned sparrows, a hawk that swooped with the regality of a honed predator far above. It was worlds away from the place you’d brought me to in the little northern city, tucked between the rain-dark forest and the quiet blue lake, where your brother had skipped stones across the water. But those were different days, different times.

Instead I spoke the language you’d taught me. It was almost like an animal’s method of communication, full of half-starts and hesitation, the turning of a face into an open hand. I was unfamiliar with such displays of patience in men, and I’d also long suspected that something dark lurked at the core of everything I cared for. When I couldn’t find it in you — the poisonous center, the cold black anger that lifts only rarely to the eyes — I reacted, frantic, in the only way I knew how: by planting it in you myself.

You had two different faces. At night you were transformed.

I tried to think of the stranger I’d drunkenly confessed my love to a few months before. I tried to think of your brother. I tried to think of the roads I’d driven before I met you, how that certain cut of light would be forever lost to me now, the slow sure happiness I held like water cupped in my palm. I could only think of you.

Do this, you said—do that. You’re wearing too much; you’re wearing too little. I want to see the line of your throat when you gasp — I want to see everything. “If you don’t give me what I want, then I’ll take it.” I was stupid enough to consider it a promise rather than a threat. And then your slow exhale, a sigh into the gorgeous morning: “Of course I like you, can’t you tell?”

These nightly humiliations were rituals in the purest sense. When you watched me through the lens and snapped the shutter, what did you really see?

To you, it was justice. To me it was intolerable. I’ve only taken so long to write this down because the words wouldn’t come; some stories aren’t pretty enough to tell. They’re too outlandish even in the confines of my head; sometimes I look back and think it happened to someone else entirely. People loathe cliches for a reason, and your sweetly coaxing words — “You’re actually stupid enough to like this, aren’t you?” — only stung because, in a way, they were true.

The past isn’t a road wound peacefully in our wake. The past is a spray of shrapnel; the past is an anchor.

I’m writing this to no one, knowing that you move throughout the world as if everything you caused to occur never did. You watched me tip back pills until the edges of my vision were blurred, directing me to try a little harder, beg more convincingly; the irony is not lost on me. You were unmoved. The restraint you showed was devastating; there’s nothing more compelling than the complete absence of desire. I think I pattern my infatuations after you even now: men who are aloof and indifferent, women who couldn’t love me even if they tried.

I wanted to carve a space for myself within you, but instead all I did was shape an emptiness I couldn’t fill. You left no bruises but shame aplenty; you killed a part of me with unnatural ease. And if this was my funeral, the wake, the eulogy – send no flowers, because I do not deserve them, and I know that neither do you.

Hands I.

Occasionally your laughter seems blindingly absurd

We’re all fixed onto our own crucifixes now;

Such abhorrent lack of discipline has earned you three lashes

Stop shaking with your lips pressed against the cup

We’re all the same you whisper, we’re all the same

And “Christ forgive them, they know not what they do”

(do you?)

Even the dirt under your fingernails marks His love, you say

And I do not have the strength to push your hands away

midnight in the garden

I brought you to Eden, the place whose name I knew long before I knew yours. I brought you the flowers latticed like greenery and a crown of gold and lapis lazuli, a bottle of Grecian wine that turns to ambrosia on your tongue. We sleep with the sun and rise with the moon, trail our hands over the maps of each other’s bones - our silence fills the world. This isn’t Heaven, I tell you - because Heaven is for the dead and your heart underneath my hand beats a doubled feverish pulse. Eden is for the living.

They say that here Lilith walked barefoot underneath the curving trees and Adam lazed with the long-toothed lions in the fragrant afternoon hush, and Eve tempted a serpent - or did she? - with great lambent eyes the color of the poorest jade. They say that this is the place where it began and where it will end, that though the eye is caught by light, the shadows have more to tell. 

Through the half-light, I see you, the honey-brown hair that curls in cunning profusion, eyes the color of some other country’s sky. The truth stumbles from my tongue. I know this is less about you than it is about me. I know you will vanish before I have you; that I am tempting you as if with an apple in the serpent’s mouth, offering my embellished self to make you stay. This is the best of me and it looks like the worst of you, quick-spoken and always laughing, bright eyes cast dark. I close my mouth before I say anything else, turn back to the trees and see the arrow-winged birds dart through the sky. Some truths aren’t meant to be excavated, exhumed, uncovered. Some words should die on the tongue.

I remember. The stars were receding dizzily through the veils of remaining light, and the little garden cats dozed in the branches of the trees. There was the wordless crooning of a nameless song through the brush, a school of cicadas hushing us to silence. But you would not stay. I had given you the moonlight and the wisterias’ nectar, the serpent and the trees, and you would not stay. This was paradise, I told you, blank-eyed and at defeat. What more was there?

Midnight in Eden is now silent through the songs. I should turn my cheek, I know, gaze at the wealth of riches, taste the honey-wine as I once did with you. My shadow knifes the red of the dying sun, remains unmoving for hours at a time, moments longer than years. I should leave this place too. Instead, I sit still in the sun-torched grass with a serpent slipping up my arm and coiling round my waist. I sit with him in silence underneath the nights that smell of jasmine and taste of loss. And though far away the moon observes, she offers me no reply.

identity loss

I think I mistook you for someone else. I wish I could explain this - but I can’t - how everyone I meet is a reflection of someone who came before. And I wish I could tell you - but I can’t - how every silence between us is a language that I can’t speak, the words slipping away unmoored into the dark.

There’s an art to this. Everything that I’ve done to you was once done to me. And sometimes I wonder if in another life I saw you, if we passed one another on the street, if the distance between us hurt more than the impact. I can look back, now, and see patterns emerge: I’m not as young as I was before. I don’t know how you see me because I still don’t know how to see myself. I can envision the bitten fingernails, the knotted scar on my hip and the uneven bow of my mouth, but somehow even this fades when I consider the features in the mirror. It’s someone else’s face, reflected differently in each span of light, pale-boned with eyes impossibly dark. My features are amorphous and I am a stranger and I can’t tell you of all the times I’ve loved strangers too.

I’ve heard that this sort of thing is God’s way of remaining anonymous. The effortless knife and lazy blade, the incision between two people, the widening of water. There was his stained t-shirt and there was the flat expanse of his chest and how he used to laugh like the devil, and smile like him, too. His face wasn’t like mine. It was fixed, unsubtle, the haze of his green eyes forest-dark, how he used to tease me and tell me that my worries were going to fall apart just as surely as anything else. He told me that what I felt was a passing mistake, that I was someone he’d stumbled over and that I needed to stop bowing my head towards him like a cat in want of adoration, that these sorts of things only ended in one way. But what does that even mean - an ending? 

I remade myself in his image. The needless quirks, how he smoked only Reds, how he was somehow filled with a mad hope for the world. Loving him was like living inside of a stranger’s skin. Light looked different. Shadows receded. And somewhere in between adoring him and abandoning him there was that moment, coming to a palpitating point and then vanishing completely - the moment where I realized I’d become someone else.

Now even shadows have a depth to them, a deeper darker black; when I stand in your silhouette I feel transformed. There’s a word for this in some other language, I’m sure, but not in my own: the knowledge that you have been turned inside out by someone else. You can leave a person but they never leave you. They come back, always, in bad dreams and street names, old houses and older roads; just the other week I walked the path we wound together years ago. Sometimes I think I almost catch a trace of you - dark curl of hair or too-long lashes - but they’re gone before I can open my hand to catch them. You aren’t returning, to me or to this place, and no presence is ever felt so strongly as a lack.

the house

Sometimes I forget that I’m not someone else. Sometimes I forget that the person I shaped myself into for her wasn’t who I became: smiling and sitting knee-to-knee at the edge of our friend’s party, the sour beer on her breath and how I tried my best to sit very straight, elongating my neck like the actresses I saw in magazines. She didn’t notice, I don’t think, and this was the beginning of some strange lifelong habit: knotting myself like a cherry stem on an extended tongue for the amusement of those around me, patterning myself after inimical people. 

Their names are still foreign and clumsy in my mouth. I can’t speak them aloud. I know that if I wanted to, I could find them now like I was found. Unravel their lives slowly, worrying the threads until they came apart entirely in my hands. I can’t imagine them as having families, friendships, children; their voices have vanished entirely. And if I don’t know the sound of someone’s voice they somehow cease to be real.

They never existed, and what they did to me never happened - this is the unreality I live, balanced constantly on the edge of fear, that he or she will leave me as they did. It wasn’t the shame but the abandonment that ate me alive. Sometimes I worry that I dreamed those days, throwing looks backward as I walked down the street, so certain that they’d found me in an impossible place. But everything about them was so well-orchestrated, so breathtakingly engineered; they could have mapped me out with blind hands, and discovered me in the dark.

Now I know not to trust implicitly and I do it regardless - throwing my griefs at the feet of whoever will listen. These are trauma bonds, regret in every inflection, as if telling these strangers the things I’ve done will make my sins disappear. And still all I know about the people surrounding me on the street is that they will never be her.

At night sometimes I like to drive, especially just before the rain; the light seems to hold itself in just a certain way. After midnight I can coax myself to calmness, remind myself that just because they didn’t love me doesn’t mean that they didn’t love a part of me - and maybe that will have to be enough. I retrace the same black miles in my car again and again, hold conversations in my head with people I’ve never met and am too afraid to. By this time they are all at the end of a long list: girls with brown hair and brown eyes, men evasive and quiet, half a dozen different people who I feel I could rescue if I just found the right things to say.

This is the house I’ve returned to. This isn’t a home but a final resting place. Dirty handprints streaked on the walls, cats under the floorboards and a sink filled with muddy water. The ghosts here don’t sleep. Here I plan to will myself into nothingness; when the hunger caves in my stomach I close my eyes and imagine the skin sloughing off my bones. Here I can pretend I’m someone else.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if my pulse doubled beneath your hand. In this house the arrow-winged birds nest in the eaves and slices of sunlight cut through the dusted blinds. You can’t see me - you wouldn’t care to see me - but I can see you. Ragged dark hair and quiet eyes, your heart in your throat. I have memorized your patterns, the willfulness like an animal’s. The skim of your hair down your neck and the wings of your shoulder blades, narrow silhouette and the wide cheekbones like a cat’s.

I used to think that she and I shared the same lungs, that if you split us open we would each breathe for the other. Your shadow is long and it scythes the light like a blade. You are a stranger in this house, too. At night the floorboards creak and something moves in the attic; the darkness chases the sleep from my eyes. This is all indulgently melodramatic, though, and I loathe it. For so long this place stood empty until I came to fill it, but it feels no more lived-in now that I’m here. I wash my hands in the sink but they never come clean, and though I speak to the memory of you it never speaks back.

a sound only I could hear

I can still remember your hand over your heart as you paused at the jagged shoreline, the way you stood so straight, unafraid -- and I’ve always tried to make myself smaller. When you inhaled it was like a sound only I could hear. At night I listened to you pace outside of my bedroom, treading paths on the dusky carpet, and I’d lay and count the ways we were the same. I’d wake before dawn and look in on you; in sleep your vivid face would be shuttered closed, and each time it was like a wave breaking, the howling sea just before it returned to itself once more. Knowing you felt like coming home. 

Love diminishes us. I was so small in your shadow. I’ve never been good at adoring anyone in halves; even now I feel the burst of my heart against the cage of my ribs, that last rush of beauty and hope. I’m afraid that this will rise in me again; I can’t afford to love anyone the way I loved you. 

Amazing how stubborn we are: we stumble into fondness, fall, rise, and stumble again. I don’t want to miss you before you were ever here. That’s life, though, isn’t it? A girl standing in knee-high dying grass in the blaze of autumn, the golden afternoon light in a summer kitchen, little northern towns whose borders I wish I could have walked with you. Every mark on the map is a memory. I can imagine you tracing the lines of your own cheekbone like you always did, as if to make sure that you were still there. I could have told you. I could have told you that you existed because to me you were the only thing that did.

Every story I have ever told ends and begins identically: someone reaching for something in the dark. The beautiful alienation of loneliness. In the cold predawn silence we’re all the same and that’s how I remember you. Alone. I would have carved a home out of myself, snapped my ribs and hollowed my lungs, walked the antler-bones of my hips with my fingers. I’d have given you everything, and in a way I think I did.

I haven't seen a familiar sight since you left me. The walls of my city look foreign. Detroit is a wasteland and it’s wasting me away. I want room in my heart to see someone the way I saw you, and maybe that’s what I have. Or maybe it’s the space you left behind. 

an endless ring of circles

Every single time I saw you it began again. Like a riddle I’d explained how I find the same things beautiful in women as I do in men: a feral imperfection that makes their faces strangely hungry, the hard white teeth and gorgeous dark hair. Read between the lines, I’d been asking you, always better with wordplay than a straight simile; I am so utterly interested in those who have no interest in me. You with your sweet coyness and charcoal-colored eyes, something out of a storybook where fey strangers lead fools to their dew-laden deaths.

There was character to your face, a sly sense of self-possession that bordered on vulgarity. No one would have ever called you beautiful. You were too aware, too heartbreakingly curious, and beauty is formed from restraint.

“Why are you always like this?” I was brave enough to ask you once, as we stood outside the party with our teeth chattering and our hands pale and blue from cold. 

“Like what?” Your face transformed when you were inquisitive, reddened mouth parting to reveal a sharp glint of white teeth. I remember thinking that I wished I could have made you see the world the way I saw you.

“The way you are, I mean.” The words came out in a tumble: awkwardly, rushed. You just looked at me and smiled.

Time passed effortlessly in your presence; moments melted into minutes into hours. When I made you laugh I felt dizzy, intoxicated, and when you reached out to touch my hand, or to straighten my shirt collar, I would draw away to pull you closer. We had our own language, a childish flirtation that never bloomed into romance, and I hoarded it with the selfishness of someone who knows all the best stories end unwritten.

I thought that I could have passed my life away with you. I had dreams of us winding paths somewhere between the coasts, rustic Americana and shaded motel rooms, sugared black coffee and a beat-up car with a broken radio. Cities were too small and the plains too vast; on the canvas of memory I’ve painted you as more like me than you ever truly were. Restless and evasive, uneasy and edged in loss. Even now I see your shadow scything the golden afternoon light, the curve of your silhouette, and I imagine you the way I imagine everyone I’ve ever loved: in a place far enough away to be happy.

summer storms

When everyone in my life fled to the cities and the coasts, their existences unfolding like the maps in their hands, I stood still. I kept their gorgeously-written letters, the quaint postcards, inhaled the glamour right from the pages and slid my fingertips over the slick surfaces: Paris, New York, Los Angeles. And my reality, which had always depended on a narrowness of vision, expanded; I stood ankle-deep in lakes so vast I could see no sight of shore, lazed in the buttery afternoon light of dingy diners, drank from whiskey bottles in unending midwestern seas of grass.

There’s a beauty in places only half-wild. It’s so easy to find a home in all the empty spaces: little forgotten hovels of the past. Once I stood under the eaves of a stone church in the flat Michigan countryside and saw the sky turn before my eyes, an eerie aurora borealis that seemed close enough to touch. 

It was always like that, when the storm came low and everything looked like death.

Not even the animals are caged there. The sheep wander sleepily from one edge of earth to the next, the dogs run loose and the housecats watch like sphinxes from beneath the rows of hedges. I would wake up in the preternatural stillness before morning and throw off the bedcovers, pace the cottage and drink coffee in silence, calmed by the easy peace of solitude.

Sometimes — and this was how I always rationalized it, always — it was just a little easier to love places than to love people.