I think maybe it was after my last relationship that went south, I confessed to Isaac that I felt silly and embarrassed at this point even acknowledging it when I date someone. What used to be months together before destruction now seems to only be weeks and I’m wondering if it’s me at this point. What is wrong with me? His assurance to me was that I needn’t feel silly or embarrassed and that he’s confident someday I’ll find what I’m looking for. Comforting at the time but empowering now, I realize that months have turned to weeks because it’s becoming a narrower and narrower window in which I’ll allow myself to entertain what isn’t for me. Nothing is wrong, dear, this is just how ugly growth can look.
Ex-plosions
I’m treading lightly.
I’m afraid that no matter where I step -involuntary manslaughter, bug-slaughter, removal of life.
It’s the real reason I look down.
I’m not afraid to make eye contact, it’s powerful.
Four minutes looking into someone’s eyes, silently, can rehumanize a person.
A course once taught me to do this daily when I committed to trying to turn my best-friend-turned-enemy back into best-friend and lover.
It didn’t work.
It wasn’t the eye contact that failed us it was us who failed each other, ourselves.
I never remembered telling you that you couldn’t leave until I heard my words repeated back to me, at least a year too late.
Now, I can see that, but that version, of self, I call her Mrs. Attachment – Mrs. Fear of Abandonment.
I used to wish you would have left, thinking maybe that would have saved us. Focus in on the words used to because the truth is we have bodies like minefields, and it was only a matter of time.
It’s easy to confuse a minefield with love when the first explosion happens above the heart – pressure, it was touched.
It’s not much harder when it comes in the form of a geyser shooting out from between your thighs, mine.
Before I knew it, explosions started coming out of my mouth – words, vomit, sometimes word vomit.
We’ve all heard, though, that actions speak louder than words and I, desperately, wanted to be heard.
So, when it was time to act, I threw punches – at the walls, cabinets, counters, the car, my own thighs. At anything but you.
I had never felt so crazy and so I told myself that love makes us do crazy things sometimes.
When I say you drove me to the looney bin, well I’m still trying to figure out how I mean it.
Yes, you drove me and sat beside me and held my hand as long as you could in that waiting room. I just mean that maybe that started before we even got into the car – the driving, the waiting for insanity.
I found a video, of you driving. You were always driving. A video, driving, up a mountain. Even after we tore our worlds apart, the video was full of laughing. Oh the possibility that we would never get back down.
When I remember you, that’s what I see, laughing – high up there, hoping to never come back down.
I’m trying so hard to remember life before all of the explosions.
When I dated a boy that grew up in a third-world country, mostly alone in an apartment with his barely older brother all through their childhood, I thought he had it rough.
It wasn’t until writing this poem that it occurred to me that maybe on the day he told me I had been through a lot and should be proud of coming out of it kind, still, maybe it was the familiarity of starvation he saw in my eyes.
A body above average, cramming food into my mouth because I’ve had this hunger that I can’t seem to satiate, only it’s nothing that food can cure.
Maybe he saw the way war was waged against me but only ever by my own people, my own self, my own mind.
Is it even possible to win when you are both the victim and the attacker? How do you win when you don’t know what outcome you’re after?
My current relationship? I’ve been handling it like a box marked fragile since I set my hands on it.
I can justify saying this by elaborating on the fact that the bed is soft and I have no qualms about throwing breakable things onto cushioned surfaces. Call it calculated risk, my dear.
Everything about you feels like risk but I’m leaning in.
But tread lightly, my heart can’t handle a stampede. I’ll get swept up in it, carried away and the last thing I can handle is another case of involuntary slaughter on my hands. Please.
Madeline May I... 