stone fruit

This was summer. This was summer in all its glory, full-throated and poignant, none of autumn’s fine cool light or springtime’s indistinct haze. This was brassy sunshine and the turn of a young girl’s ankle in the grass — beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. His hand between my frail bare shoulder blades and the sun-warmed bronze of my summer-skin, nights that came too early and left too soon. The world was coming up verdant and green, the sky wild and disordered with stars, and around us a lonely city breathed light.

I was so tired of living in a place where we condemned all that we couldn’t understand. I loved him but he did not love me: the beginnings of a dozen different songs, each sweeter and softer than the last. I had the words but not the voice, no melody with which to sing them. So I held them inside, rib cage forced full of hollow space, every inhalation a rhythm. 

I remember the way the light fell lurid and golden, the loam soft beneath my feet. This is how it always will be, he was telling me. You will never be free. You will always fall for him and he will always ruin you — you will always emerge as something less than you were before. Summer in its loveliness, so solemn and so sad, the bittersweetness of it all in the back of my throat. It ached, and it was beautiful, and I missed him terribly: brassy gold hair soft as a fawn’s throat and cropped short, green-gray eyes and a shy smile. Being without him was almost like living in a world without color: but if you’d never known it, how could you be expected to miss it?

We do not serve one another by obeying temptation — I know that better now. I see him in everyone and everyone in him; summer still steals the breath from my lungs after all this time. I was so sorry that he ended up being one of “those”, warm and promising as his infrequent smiles, but ultimately just as empty as he claimed me to be. So instead I am writing this letter, one that I will never put in the mail, never address, never seal in an envelope. I can’t say that I don’t know why we hurt the people we want the most. I know it’s because I wanted him to reach for me. 

One confession: I still don’t know what love is. I know that it’s one step below obsession and one above compassion, sideways of affection and in between want and infatuation. I hear that it’s supposed to be perfect and selfless, but the extent of my knowledge begins to fade to black when I think about all the times I could have done better. 

So I might not know what love is — but I do think I know what it’s not. 

call us liars

I think I saw you first in a dream. Broad face like a cat’s and vulpine cheekbones, eyebrows long as brush strokes and slender as willow leaves. You had a luminescent and open quality to your features, like an elf’s or a seraphim’s, that everyone always mistook for innocence. As a result you were an interesting creature, impatient and unlovely in nature, but still somehow magnetic. People always watched you. You drew eyes like flies to honey.

Now I imagine you reading my words, every syllable and intonation, every hidden turn of phrase that I worked so hard to conceal. You will never know that this is about you.

You were like a language I’d once known but had now forgotten, a song whose melody escapes me entirely. I used to imagine the pair of us far out to nowhere, in the poignant empty plains where I could rest my head and where you could sleep. A beat-up car with a broken radio, the sky disordered and wild with stars. I had a dozen different dreams and you were in every one of them. I remember running my hand through your dark cropped hair, soft as a fawn’s throat and shorn close, and the heartbreaking blue of your eyes. You sat outside of the motel with your gaze shaded, feet kicked up on the railing, a bottle of cheap off-brand soda in one hand and a fifth of Swedish vodka in the other. I would have burned the world down for you, I remember telling you—and you smiled then like I’d meant it. Maybe I had.

We both liked to drive just before the rain, loved how the light always held itself in just a certain way. The gleam of sunshine throwing a gleam onto the gold of your dark hair, your frail wrists—too slender for a man, too slender, but marked also with gruesome tattoos. How many tattoos do you have? I asked you once, and you said you didn’t know — you’d forgotten, just as you’d forgotten so much else.

How quickly someone you know becomes someone you knew. We kept to ourselves in the darkest ways, abusing shot glasses filled with tepid vodka and pints of sweet whiskey-rye. We’d each sworn that people belong to people and not to a place; we promised we’d never part. But I didn’t belong to you, and you didn’t belong to me, and our brief mistakes—shirts and jackets strewn across the room, you holding me up against the wall with a hand over my mouth—vanished  as soon as we each left the bed.

“Another secret,” you would always say before you left. I didn’t know if you meant the shame or the scratches down your back, and it wasn’t my place to ask. 

the killing floor

The past does not stay where it belongs. The past comes back in shudders and starts, in phantom limbs and ghost memories and night terrors, in tension wound up the spine and through the tendons. The past lives in darkness, in the helplessness of bad dreams, in the buzz saw air of autumn and the lurid dusk of a too-warm summer. The past is morgue and killing floor, butcher shop and final resting place, and I’m gripping these pliers in my hands because at this point I’ve grown so fucking sick of yanking your teeth.

The problem with you is that you wouldn’t recognize love if it stood on your step dressed in geraldine and crimson, trailing seaflowers and sand and shadow. You wouldn’t recognize love if it knocked on your door wearing someone else’s clothes, covered in someone else’s blood, cradling someone else’s knife.

Tired of ravaging myself for you. Tired of swallowing the dull ache of resentment when I see you and your happiness, your domestic bliss, when once it was my hand you held and my cheek you kissed. There’s something the color of rust under my nails and grit on my tongue and I haven’t washed my hair in three days; I imagine you, then, perfectly coiffed, the long light hair to the wings of your shoulders and your white hands, white flowers, white home. Your harp-shaped back through the thin blouses you wear, and the graceful sweep of your freckled arms. You always stood so straight, like Audrey Hepburn, and your smile was Monroe’s.

Sometimes I’ll drink three fingers of whiskey in Grosse Pointe’s humid cage, tip my chin up to the sky and see nothing at all. They say that you can get whatever you want if only you are willing to pay the price, and I paid yours; where, then, is the tollbooth, the easy slip into another road, another life?

“Sorry about this,” I told you, (because this was, of course, the beginning of my incessant apologies to those around me), “Sorry for loving you, God I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’d have loved anyone else. I tried, I tried, I tried, and I wasn’t strong enough.” The boil of tears in my throat. I wasn’t strong enough.

I have dreams like this: a deer hanging from a gambrel, your exhalation like snow in the frigid air, the rifle still loaded by the cabin door. I’m on the table with the knives, and when your small hand lifts one to the moon  it fractures the shards of light entirely. Of course I thought I was the hunter, the stalker, vulpine and sharp-toothed and dark. And I thought that right until you drew near with the fixed blade in your small white hand and pressed it to my throat -- how the blood left me first at a stumble and then at a gallop, devil-black and hot as sin. I thought I was the hunter right until the moment you slit my neck. And maybe that’s love, or maybe it’s something like it -- or maybe it’s merely the closest I’ve ever come and ever will.

homeland

I wrote the most beautiful things when I was in love with you. Existence was a perpetual autumn even in winter, dizzy and windswept, the colors of life somehow louder than sound. Everything a memory waiting to turn to anguish. Everything an echo of something else.

I was only ever a dreamer in those days, and maybe that’s the kindest thing I can say of anyone: that beside the ache of loneliness, the serpentine curl of dread, there was that unmistakable sense of returning somewhere I’d been before yet had never wanted to leave. And maybe, selfishly, that’s why I loved you: because you’d always felt like home.

And I realized that it would always feel like something had been taken from me, every single time. Because I would always be the one left standing, and they would always be the ones to depart; because in the prism of my memories they would remain the way they were as I loved them first. And how to tell anyone that I stumbled into fondness so easily, to please be merciful if they couldn’t be kind, that once I sensed they were alive in the same way I was that they would never die?

Sometimes I feel people’s kindnesses curling under the edges of my vulnerability like fingertips. It makes me wary, and it’s impossible to explain what I’m positive most others wouldn’t understand. And anyhow, I’m half-certain that words would diminish it regardless, that words are for those who don’t know a thing as innately as I do: like how when we describe love, or passion, or fear, we describe everything around it but the emotion itself. Faulkner explained it best: how once you felt it, you wouldn’t need words any longer. You’d know. 

Looking up at the starry emptiness felt like an ending and I knew it was. To some any kind of death is a beginning and to others a cessation and to others a rebirth; to me it’s a stillness. 

In my head, I did everything right. I was gentler and so were they. I turn my mom’s words over like stones in my mind, trying to make sense of them: “I promise you that there is no such thing as too much kindness.” I try to carry it with me. I try to soften myself against the world and I remember that inescapable feeling when I saw you first in the city, your wind-curled hair and strange dark eyes. I don’t have the words for it, but I don’t need them. I just know.

I remember:

We went deep into the mountain where we breathed coal smoke, and when we came back up the sky was a disarming blue and we searched for gold in the river. I sat on a bench in the town in the sky and ate an ice cream cone and crossed my legs and thought that Thoreau was right, and that we are only ourselves when we’re far away, and that I would spend the rest of my life trying to recapture those moments–a hawk circling above a naked tree, a black so deep you cannot penetrate it, a thousand years of weeping water.

“In wilderness is the preservation of the world” and I was young and stupid and my heart was broken and everything meant something. Youth idealizes each sweet moment and suspends it in amber; I was no different, although I thought I was.

It is still all I want, an open sky and a house on a mountain and a pair of dogs and solace so that I can begin to try and understand the world. I am awkward and flimsy and an utter disappointment. I will vanish and it will be the kinder thing, because a part of me has always loved tragedy, and I’d rather be a ghost on the side of a desert road, thumb up, suitcase in hand, than take up space in this frozen city.

half-empty rooms

I know that I should have told you. But at this point, I also know that it’s too late. Half empty glasses stuck to vinyl countertops, my cheek against faux wood tables in dim diners, hot Michigan summers in no-where land. I close my eyes and I breathe. Bring winter, please. Bring winter before I’ve peeled myself away.

Broken hearts and broken bones hurt just the same. The force on impact would have been beautiful—a split lip, a torn heart. We have all walked this way so many times that it becomes an unbalanced cadence, the song you turn down on the radio because it’s always made you impossibly sad. The familiar ways feel tired, paths worn winding on the inside of my wrist and the road leading from your driveway. You come inside and shake the dirt from your shoes and turn the shower on steaming. You get in and you cry.

Lids are drawn against the night like shuttered windows but even light turns dark. It’s not your responsibility, the fault was all in the design, not the execution—we are meant to hurt one another, it’s why we breathe like we’re breaking. And have you wondered? You won’t ever be good enough. You weren’t made to be.

We’re all sharp edges and jutting hip bones, meant to hurt and not to fit. You won’t be enough until they say you are, and by then it will be too late to matter, just like everything else. And it’s sick, the way I skim around the beating vibrancy of your heart, trying to explain; no, it’s not right that you feel like nothing until they say you are something, but I’ve only ever seen myself through someone else’s eyes. The lies stick to my tongue. I’ve only ever needed me.

It’s quiet now, because silence is what happens when you don’t let people in too close. Until you come near and you say, We dig our own graves. And I say, I know, I know. You taught me how.