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.

"you remind me of everyone"

I think so often now about all the places we saw together. I can’t imagine New York without you in it, the velvet darkness as it fell over the city and how the buildings came alive under its spell. I remember the tilt of light in late Boston afternoons, half-full glasses of whiskey that looked like they drank up the sun and that lonely smell of the sea. Then Oregon, always Oregon, how the mountains dropped abruptly into the wild air and how we were all so breathless with the thrill, looking endlessly down. I remember sitting on the pull-out bed in our hotel room and writing about I thought these days of adventure might be the happiest times of my life. I’ve been wrong about so much, but I wasn’t wrong about that.

It’s too late now and I know this. But sometimes I still dream I’m in the mountains -- and you’re there, you as how I remember you, with your black hair and bright eyes, the wonderful surprise of your laugh. You’re never any older in my dreams; and then I realize with a sinking heart that you’ll never be any older when I wake up.

The world goes on even if the people within it don’t. I know they say you shouldn’t regret anything, that you’ll regret the things you haven’t done more than the ones that you have. But I also know that the people who say that haven’t made my mistakes.

It’s harder than it used to be to look both forward and back. I remember being very young, the glossy sheen of western sunshine on my legs and the earth underneath my back, the weight of the sky as I peered upward. In those days my skin was almost as dark as yours. I remember telling you that I’d heard someone say before that because this wasn’t heaven we didn’t have to be perfect. It was just earth. You told me that no one ever has to be perfect, because no one ever is.

I was never warned how a place can be marked so deeply by a life. When I go up north now, sit on the porch in the still evenings and look out on the water, I try to see it as clearly as you once did. I count the gray-white birds as they skim across the glass surface of the lake, and I try to memorize everything about it that you ever loved.

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.

"absolute terror and absolute excitement"

It always spun me one of two ways: towards grandiose delusion or bone-deep fear, as I scrabbled desperately for a hold on the ledge of reality. I didn't realize it could happen to anyone; I didn't realize that, though severe and debilitating, it is terribly common; I didn't realize that the pills I thought were literal poison (did my doctor hate me? was there a well-laid conspiracy beneath every step I took, a pattern in every groove?) would save me. Misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, watching people's expressions morph terrifyingly before my eyes, I lost years of my life that I will never get back.

Sometimes it was almost marvelous; I thought I was on the edge of transcendence, literally delirious with excitement, repeating revelations under my breath until they lost their meaning entirely. At the time, I thought it was a symptom of my flair for dramatics, that I was coming close to some truth incomprehensible to those around me. Deluded with the notion that I was somehow special instead of a poorly-functioning psychotic (which is nowhere near as glamorous), I slipped in and out of awareness until I lost it altogether.

It can happen to anyone, and if it happens to you, you will likely resist every ounce of help offered to you. I did.

In a white room with white walls and a white bed, empty and charmless, I curled over myself and listened to the sounds of the woman across the hall. "They're talking about me again," she was telling the nurse. "These men on the news. They're always talking to me, and I try not to listen." Suffused with cold dread, I said nothing of my fears when the RN came to me -- because I'd been thinking the same thing.

I'm not blameless at all; I self-medicated myself until I slipped into the same terror that I was trying to avoid. Instead of taking antipsychotics with any sort of consistency, I relied solely on anti-anxiety agents, took downers to quell the fear. You will never meet anyone so sure of themselves as someone who is floridly delusional; they don't need help -- you just don't see the truth -- are you fucking stupid for not understanding everything that they do? It's all so obvious. The patterns (there are always, always patterns) are evident if you'd let the scales fall from your eyes. Just because it's impossible doesn't mean it isn't true.

But there's a truth beyond the transcendence of everything the paranoid patient ardently believes. Antipsychotics aren't just medications for the hopelessly ill, for the violent or "insane," or for those who will never get better. They're prescribed for depression, for personality disorders, for anxiety. And they cut through the delusional "clarity" of psychosis like a knife: even if residual fear and paranoia remain, you'll likely still be far better off.

We need to destigmatize the administration of antipsychotics, because while in some cases they're over-prescribed, they also frequently save lives. I still can't describe the unbearable feeling of lightness in my chest when the cold dread finally seeped away, and I remembered what happiness was. It felt as if I was inhaling the first clear breath I'd taken for years. I don't think I'll ever forget the strange sensation: like I was coming back to life, and that I was getting a second chance that so many unfortunately don't.

the shadows will never find you

Sometimes I think about what it would have been like if we’d known one another as kids, bruise-kneed and bloody-knuckled, lapping at our charred fingers as we held them too close to the fire. The vigor of summer underneath our feet, slanted green light in our eyes; swinging skinny knees over the docks to vanish into the water, slick as eels. And the strangest part of all is that sometimes it does seem real; sometimes it does feel as if I’ve known you all this time, in another place, maybe, another world.

And in that world, maybe none of the bad things would have happened. Maybe I wouldn’t have done things I couldn’t take back. Maybe I wouldn’t have fallen in love with all of the wrong people. Maybe you’d be happier, maybe I’d be less anxious, less wary. Maybe we wouldn’t fly so deliriously high. Maybe we wouldn’t be addicted to the glow of a bottle, that heavy head tilt back when you know you’ve hit the sweet spot, when you know that for that single moment, you’re okay.

You’re gonna be okay.

And – here is where my heart tightens – maybe in another world, you wouldn’t have lost your dad, and I wouldn’t have lost my mom.

Maybe you understand me better than I understand myself; maybe the inverse is also true, and maybe that’s why we speak in code, all the little things we grasp about one another without the benefit of words. Maybe it’s why, to me, you have never been less than beautiful. So many miles between us and absolutely none between our hearts. And god, it’s so fucking cliche, but cliches are cliches for a reason – because at their core there’s often a ring of truth.

There are so many things I want. I want to kiss your cheek and hug you so tight you squeak and try to pull away; I want to bring you to the lakeshore, so we can dip our ankles in the water against the backdrop of the archaic mansions; I want to take you downtown with our stupid hats and our stupid t-shirts, sitting in a dive bar with three hundred pound men and play darts and drinking games until we’re kicked out onto the empty Detroit streets.

All of my greatest love stories have been with the friends I couldn’t bear to leave behind.

In some ways, you are my salvation from the mundane, from the dregs of depression, from the paranoia, from the false promises spoken on honest tongues – “You’ll be okay, I’ll never leave you, you’ll be okay, I don’t care what happens, I will always love you. Always, always, always. You don’t have to be afraid anymore. I am here.”

Because when you say it, I believe it.

I see things in you, beneath that crown of snow-white hair. Your head is bloody but unbowed; your eyes look towards the sky.

It honestly amazes me, how you’re always looking towards the sky.

I don’t ever want you to look down again.

if I can only say one thing,

it will have to be this.

I remember the first day we met; and that’s strange, because I can’t say that about anyone but you. You, with your leg warmers and flats and anxious smile in the middle of math class, turning to slip me a note with your palm faced-down, giant green eyes flashing with mischief, like you wanted so badly to know me — or like you already did.

We aren’t defined by what we keep with us, but by what we leave behind. 

The moon is brilliant on the lake tonight, and the water is like glass, and the wind has an atmospheric chill. Everywhere around me, the world is decaying, but fall to me has always been that season of beginning, of rebirth. And purely by luck (or not), it’s also the season I began to fall in love with you.

‘Fall in love with you.’ Most people don’t understand that, and it frustrates me, because any half-decent friendship is its own kind of love story, its own romance. The initial courting, the exhilaration, the involuntary bursts of laughter, hidden jokes, hidden smiles. I told you everything I’d ever done; you told me everything you’d ever wanted. And, I think, we loved each other all the more — it was that rare kinship, like we’d met elsewhere, in this world or the one before. 

I want to describe our friendship in words, but words can only do so much; they’re the ache, the anticipation, everything around it but the promise itself. 

It’s the air after rain, the stillness after a storm; me, curled up on your bed and you on the floor, coaxing me back into gentleness, reassuring me, yes, it’s okay, you can love who you love, we all love who we love and there’s no shame in it. My heavy eyelids flickering up and my hazel gaze, light and illuminated, catching yours: your friendship purer than what I thought I felt for her, or for him, or for her. We love who we love. Do you know how many times I’ve thought back to those nights sleeping in bed with your cats, watching horror movies until we could sleep no longer?

Maybe you do.

Language is a struggle, something that can’t express all that you hope to convey. They say love is sex, love is lust, but for me — it’s always been my closest friends and me, curled up in bedsheets, shielding ourselves from the oncoming rain. Nothing will ever kill the way I care for you.

The light will rise soon, and everything is coming up green. The world might change, but I can promise you this: nothing between us ever will.

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.