death by winter

She's not 'running away'. There's a negative connotation to those words: one that she can't easily escape. It sticks to the roof of her mouth. She's just 'getting out of here'. That's it. She's forging her own way. She's packing her things in a suitcase, something that she will be able to carry down the street, into the bus, onto the train into the city. She counts her cash. It's enough. It'll be enough. 

I have dreams like this. 

I've built my own personal Jericho. Walls are temporary; they will crumble, but for now we hide. I am not stagnating, suffering, lying. I am saving myself instead. At night I pull myself onto the kitchen counter and practice self destructive habits. They are quiet, elusive. You won't see them unless you watch. Look for a blurry eye or a shaking hand, a hint of too much medication. The doctors deny both my future and the fleeting fragility of my mind. I surrender only in sleep, in dreams. I wait for the day that these walls can break and the girl with the suitcase can take the train far away. 

Ice is clinging to the branches in Detroit. Winter reminds me why we're alive. I want to cut off all my hair, watch it fall to the bathroom floor. Tell the girl to get the fuck out of here before it's too late. She'll swivel on the chair, watch the black hair fall. Listen to my brother and I fight. "Why are you so unhappy? Why don't you try? Where is your medication going? Who are you, anymore?" "You don't have to deal with me, you know you don't." "I know I don't." Commence with awkward silence, because we both know it's my fault. It is, after all. Hair falling to the bathroom floor like feathers. 

I'm not, by nature, a particularly dramatic person, which probably explains my desire to get out of this place. Respite comes like a drug. Late night car rides, heat blasting. Drink jack and coke and sit on cold stoops. Laugh with a stranger. Our hollowed insides are starving for something else. We cram inside crowded rooms and somehow, we don't touch. That's what I never understood. How we never touch. Our eyes never meet. 

That girl is going to take the train far away. She says she's starting over, but no one is going to believe her. They all say that. Half of them come back. She's not going to do that, because she's desperate. She's more desperate than I am. Because I'm still here, in the freezing rain, with the lengthening shadows and the grey skies.

You say, I think I'm getting out of here, I think I'm meeting someone beautiful, I think I'm going to California. And I'm begging you, no, please don't, you, and you, and you--you're the only good things about this part of town, and the snow is falling in Detroit, and it gets cold without you. Take me with you, because my reserves are nearing empty and Jericho is coming down. The ropes are wearing thin, and Jericho is coming down. It's all coming down. 

between waking and dreaming

Yes, I am a lover, and yes, I am a dreamer,

but everything inside of me is heavy, and I know now that you can be more than one type of person at once. The girl who jumps off the bridge and remembers halfway down that everything she fears is fixable. The woman who has woken up at 6 AM every dawning morning, for the last thirty years. The man who lost his wife, burned the photos and now can’t remember her face. Everyone, because everyone has lost someone behind, and everyone has made someone cry, and everyone has failed to apologize for something because pride is the only guarantee we have.

I play games. 11:11, 1:23, 3:33. Take your pick. I make wishes on everything, eyelashes, flowers, shooting stars. It’s not because it’s endearing, an adorable girlish quirk I should have long outgrown. It’s because I am not sure I remember how to pray, and wishes were always so much easier. I sit still and hold my breath. If I make it to a certain time, that means I am safe. If I can walk the floorboards without creaking, that means you do not hate me. And if my life is aesthetically well-aligned that means, maybe, someday soon, i will be able to go.

Because that spot in the mountains was the only place I ever felt at home, lonely in the town shadowed by the gaping cliffs, where humans once dug into the rock and where I could sleep. No city’s ever made me feel like that. No city’s ever made me cry. We climbed deep into the mines and turned off the flashlights. It was all just weeping water and three hundred years of pure gold.

“you can’t see your hand in front of your face,” my brother said. “you have no idea where you’re going.”
i didn’t tell him that i never do.

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.