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.

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.

I built your walls around me

Winter is almost here, and everywhere the world is holding its breath. Ice is clinging to the branches in Detroit, and though I know this was never your season, that it was never your summer like it was mine, I would give anything to see you stumbling through the snow with the dogs, the little flakes like sugar melting in your black hair.

When you died so did I, and so nothing mattered. Until the winter thaw broke, something stirring inside of those of us who are grief-stricken and in pieces, hope growing its aching blooms in my chest. So many things to remember; so many things to try not to forget. You baking banana bread in the kitchen (and you hated cooking, you hated it) just to see me smile. You cradling my pitiful chihuahua to you and never complaining once, because he saw right through you, and you were the only one he loved. The two of us sitting in Hemingway’s favorite northern restaurant, sunset bleeding over the lake and the windows wide, the beauty of it enough to make my throat ache.

I wish I could exist without doing all the damage my living requires. I wish I could be sweeter, kinder, softer, transplant your heart inside of me. I wish I could see you one last time, not to say “I love you” — because you know I do, better than anyone — but to say “I’m sorry.” I’m sorry I wasn’t a better daughter, a better person, a better friend. Because I believe that “I’m sorry” are the two most important words in the world; and I know that I shouldn’t think that, either. But I think a lot of things that I shouldn’t.

I have protected myself for these past two years, these twenty four months, built walls around me as high as Jericho. And now, at last, they’re coming down. They’re finally coming down.