Nail-Biting Bed-Wetter

I’ve started to bite my nails like I did when I was little.  I can’t remember when I stopped, but I did a long time ago.  I began to let them grow.  Then, I began to paint them.  And now, full circle at age 18, I bite again.  I chew and I eat and I maim the ends of my fingers.  I drag my teeth across the undersides and swallow all the dirt.  And I don’t know how else to explain it save the fact that I am growing young gain.  I’ve wished so long and hard to be five again, to forget the feel of dead nose under my fingers and the stones I carried in my dress pocket to mark his grave.  I’ve wished so long that, finally, it’s happening.  And I’m being laughed at: 

“We’ll show you.  You want five?  Oh, we’ll give you five.  It comes complete with a broken elbow, push-pops, Happy Meals, pissy sheets, Swamp Thing, and bloody fingertips.  Are you happy now?” 

 

I am.

I am!

Movements

1. In my dream last night, you kissed me. My arms were winding all they way around you (I was holding my own elbows) and then my hands were on your sides and I could feel the cotton of your t-shirt sliding like silk against the pale skin underneath.
2. Your hands were on my back and I couldn’t stop feeling the way I felt through your hands. I didn’t want you not to like it, so I held my breath and tried not to move. Your hands continued to wander like you were memorizing my topography.
3. I tried not to touch your hair; I know you don’t like that. You were kissing me in a corner—good kisses. Slow ones that tease and leave other kisses to the imagination (for now).
4. We were both smiling so wide that it was hard not to laugh at each other. And I held you with my hands clasped behind your back. And we whispered and giggled into each other’s mouths, drunk on wine and affection.
5. I hooked my fingers through your belt loops as though the only way you could ever be close enough would be for you to melt with me (and I was melting).
6. You tried to do the same, but I inched away because feeling is believing and I wanted you to believe that my stomach was smaller than it was. And then I knew it could never work.
7. I could never love me so neither could you. But that wasn’t what this was about.
8. This wasn’t about anything.
9. You saw that I was scared of me and you whispered to my teeth, “I know who you are.” And I thought of a line from a poem I love: I did not want her for her body. And I tried my best to believe that that was what you meant to say. To believe that the author meant it about whomever he wrote it for. To believe that it was possible for anyone to mean.
10. So I pulled you closer still. My shoulder blades were bursting through the wall and the cinder blocks were crumbling around our feet.
11. I touched your hair (sorry, I couldn’t help it) and you kissed my neck and I opened my eyes as wide as I could to vacuum up the view—the opposite wall, the door, the ceiling. And I started to cry.
12. You kissed my cheek, tasted salt and drew back.
13. “What’s wrong?”
14. “Nothing.”
15. “Why are you crying?” your hands moved down my shoulders.
16. “Because nothing has ever not been wrong before.”
17. “Everything is right then?”
18. “No. Everything is just you and me.”
19. And then you cried too, I think, touching your lips to mine, breathing into me and nothing else and we held each other and I felt your breaths leaving and I felt you puling in new ones.
20. I woke up.
21. And when I woke up I thought it was real.
22. And when I realized it wasn’t, I thought maybe I wasn’t either.
23. And when I realized that I most certainly was, it dawned on me. I began to understand that it was indeed happening: I was going to break. I was going to destroy myself in reality to make my dreams the only escape.
24. I took a blue pill and I grabbed a red pen and I wrote all of this down on white paper with blue and red lines and I had to smile at what was left of my youth. How turning time and fresh starts bore no importance to me.
25. Then I think to myself, “Now’s as good a time as any to start dying."
26. Then I say out loud, “Dreams are for the dead."
27. And I will start to look for affection wherever I can find it. And each person I touch will take a piece of me until there is absolutely nothing left.
28. And I will tell myself, “This is what you wanted all along.”

Am I doing this right?

She grew up snail slow in a too fast town. She wanted to watch leaves fall and inhale exhaust from the cars that drove by. She wanted the time to fixate, to burn holes in things just by staring at them.
And there were these things she'd get about her face. These feelings. These
things
she'd get, about her face. These allergic reactions to her adolescence, these blinding red assertions of insecurity. The bane of her physical existence, the reason boys wouldn't even look at her when she wore that purple push-up and tried extra hard to purse her chap-sticked lips.
And he grew up too fast in a super slow town. He wanted to write books and build rockets that would launch the pages into outerspace. Whatever was out there could read them, too.
But he'd get these things about his shoulders. These
feelings
about his shoulders that went straight down instead of out like he thought they should have. The things he stared at most in the mirror after a shower, the reason he would never take his shirt off in public, or go shopping with his mom who offered to sew padding into all of his shirts.
And together, they would silently agree not to the notice the doubt in each other's eyes. They'd hold hands and buy each other presents when it wasn't any kind of holiday. They'd kiss and wonder if they were doing it right. They'd kiss and wonder why anyone would ever want to touch those cheeks with the scabs and scars, or those bony shoulders that no real man would have.

"Do you love me?" he asked.
"No," she said.
"I don't believe you."
"Do you love me?" she said.
"Yes," he answered.
"Well I'm dying. I've got cancer."
"No you don't."
"Would you love me if I did?"
"No. I don't think so."
"What a terrible thing to say."
"Okay, it's not that I necessarily wouldn't. I just can't imagine a time and place when I'd have to decide."
"I don't love you," she whispered.
"I don't believe you."

They'd lie in each other's arms and talk as though there were an audience.
But there were these things she'd get about his shoulders. These feelings about how they went straight down instead of out like she knew they should. He would never take off his shirt unless the lights were off and all of his clothes had pads stitched into the shoulders.
And there were these things he'd get about her face. He'd get feelings about the bumps that only seemed to multiply. All the make-up she wore and that ever present purple bra that somehow made her boobs look bigger, and closer together than they actually were, or something.
But when together, they would silently agree to live like question marks, sympathizing with each other's incomprehensible need for reassurance.

California Calling

"I miss your overwhelming ability to stimulate my mind."

A text. How appropriate.

"I miss your overwhelming ability to make me think I exist," she replied with three parts sarcasm and one part too afraid to wonder if she could be serious.

"Glad to hear it. Non-existence is an epidemic these days," he sent.

Then she began to think about it. "It" was whether or not she felt like she did in fact exist. Sometimes she was sure. Sometimes she was so sure she would chew it and swallow it down and regurgitate it looking like a rose. Her existence--neatly packaged and not only tangible, but soft to the touch and fragrant. Other times she second guessed. She third, fourth, and fifthguessed, thinking endlessly about how real she felt.
Thumbs poised over the keys, she pressed, "Are you going to call me tonight?" She bit her lip, begging to know why she was even participating in this twenty-first century microwave conversation.

Message recieved.
View.


"You know it."


She knew what it would mean--the exchange that would come that night. He would to tell her stories about the stars she couldn't see anymore. Stories that would make her want to fall in love, or go to the movies, or just shut her eyes. He would talk about himself and make her listen to how human he was, and then he would say things like I'm proud of you and You deserve it and I always knew this would happen for you. Then he would ask her to touch herself while he listened from 3,000 miles away. And sometimes, even, she would. She would vacantly rub some soulless fingers on her down-below and she would breathe heavily and not know why. And he would breathe too, into t he other end of the distance, and she would know then that she was real.
She'd chew up his panting
and swallow his moans
and cough up the most perfect red rose. And it all would end.


"Damn, I'll talk to you later, alright?" he would whisper. And she'd say, "Yeah, okay." Then she'd lay awake touching petals to her face until she stumbled into sleep.

She waited, eager, for the phone to sing her a polyphonic song.