Daddy tucked me in a few times earlier today. I always got up, knew I wanted the stories never to stop. Never to fade into the bedsheets where they mingled with the sleepiness. That coaxes.
When I was Joce my life turned and twisted. My friends, open-mouthed stood around and gasped.
My life entertained them and they laughed. I laughed with them.
Now, I'm older and I want to laugh. I want to laugh with my back against the wall. Against the shitty brick wall that forces me to stand straight. To look the barrel of the gun in the face and say "yes I'll die for everything I've lived"
My lungs, not red, disappoint as they twist. And I'm standing here alone. Still laughing. I think.
I have a vision in my mind. I'm standing tall and frail but fragile against a grey building with colourful tweed and bright green eyes made greener from the cold. He'll recognize me and I'll have become just that girl he had spent time with a winter ago. Our time ended the way night disappears into day. In tatters, in jutted broken fragments thrown against a painful array of time where forgiveness and forgetting seemed impossible -- on both parts. I am in a very good place. It is as fresh and hollow as a new piece of paper, as harsh and bleached as canvas.
I have no regrets. I have touched the bottom. It was actually just where I wanted to end up. I wanted to alight on the bottomest shore for a while to see just how I will raise myself up. I managed it swimmingly -- of course the pun will be pardoned but it needn't be because this is how puns are born. From meaning, not chance. This is my whole point really. I was made from meaning and I survive through it. I don't struggle against chance and coincidence because then everything is still and beautiful and scattered. Meaning grits the teeth and sets our tons and allows us to bear through it. I will be the girl who became a woman this summer. I was interrupted for a little while because I wanted to suspend my last bit of youth for as long as I could. I wanted to be a little girl who materialized out of nowhere fresh and beautiful on someone's doorstep for a night. I wanted to be taken out of my glass casing and arranged and rearranged without my absolute and required consent. And I was. I managed. Of course, only I know what I have gone through because only I am me. I am thinking very clearly tonight and I am happy.
This summer has taught me how to survive a gun wound...really, it has. A metaphorical gun wound obviously but one that shattered me nonetheless. I'm. Clohed. In. Me. I am rarely anxious now and have managed to be okay on my own.
I don't pretend to know what I'm composed of. I believe it is a mixture of forgotten fairytales, flesh, feathery pieces aligned in proportion with the pulpy ones and a whole array of empty. An empty I'm currently intent on filling. The gun wound, at first, tears and the bleeding is irrevocable. The bleeding breaks hearts. It lasts a short while and the body is filled with endorphins. After the friends, family and doctors have shaken their heads, done their parts, arranged the bandages and administered the glistening ointments they leave. The glowing hazy wound fevers and invents its own poetry for a long while afterwards. Every breeze, every warm inclination, every nearing mosquito buzzing and flower bend hurts the wound. There is not one potentiality that the wound ignores. It festers and ferments and fosters hate. Hate with cold, warmth, buzz and bend. After what can only be classified as forever, the haziness is replaced by red. A red that glows nevertheless. The glowing dissipates the way we know something effervescent to dissipate. It is replaced by a static, flat Christmasy red. A red that knows its mark. A red like the red we bled when we were still free on fields. Running under mammoths fighting for the privilege of our flesh.
Regardless. The red stays the longest. It fucking placates and it believes absolutely in the sheer force of its will. Time passes. Motions. Lunar cycles. Vampiric drooling and forgetting sets in. Seasons later, the red is a faint pink. A pink like a kiss on a letter from one of our great wars. A kiss pink. A kissing pink. A slender, pleasant, all-knowing, kind pink. The pink implies the pain without the insolence of throwing it in our face. Soon it is replaced with a brazen white cicatrice. The GraceKelly of scars. A delicate incision that resembles art more than the life that brought it into being. Cauterized and gracious, the white stains our flesh and remains forever. It is the white that endures. Divorced of pain, infused with the memory and armed with the language of story it is the sole colour that has managed to encompass the fleeting nature of our delicious pain. The white remains. By the time the white comes, we've forgotten the wound without knowing we've rehearsed the story in ourselves all along. Because the story was written in us, underneath the scar. The machinations of our story have been preparing all the while and by the time we've anatomized our hurt we've cured it too.
Alas, I imagine this:
Me. White as snow all over. Fierce and uncaring. A soldier of faith. Graceful and knowing. Curious. Patient. Calm. Cool as a panther in waiting but never waiting.
I have no regrets. I have touched the bottom. It was actually just where I wanted to end up. I wanted to alight on the bottomest shore for a while to see just how I will raise myself up. I managed it swimmingly -- of course the pun will be pardoned but it needn't be because this is how puns are born. From meaning, not chance. This is my whole point really. I was made from meaning and I survive through it. I don't struggle against chance and coincidence because then everything is still and beautiful and scattered. Meaning grits the teeth and sets our tons and allows us to bear through it. I will be the girl who became a woman this summer. I was interrupted for a little while because I wanted to suspend my last bit of youth for as long as I could. I wanted to be a little girl who materialized out of nowhere fresh and beautiful on someone's doorstep for a night. I wanted to be taken out of my glass casing and arranged and rearranged without my absolute and required consent. And I was. I managed. Of course, only I know what I have gone through because only I am me. I am thinking very clearly tonight and I am happy.
This summer has taught me how to survive a gun wound...really, it has. A metaphorical gun wound obviously but one that shattered me nonetheless. I'm. Clohed. In. Me. I am rarely anxious now and have managed to be okay on my own.
I don't pretend to know what I'm composed of. I believe it is a mixture of forgotten fairytales, flesh, feathery pieces aligned in proportion with the pulpy ones and a whole array of empty. An empty I'm currently intent on filling. The gun wound, at first, tears and the bleeding is irrevocable. The bleeding breaks hearts. It lasts a short while and the body is filled with endorphins. After the friends, family and doctors have shaken their heads, done their parts, arranged the bandages and administered the glistening ointments they leave. The glowing hazy wound fevers and invents its own poetry for a long while afterwards. Every breeze, every warm inclination, every nearing mosquito buzzing and flower bend hurts the wound. There is not one potentiality that the wound ignores. It festers and ferments and fosters hate. Hate with cold, warmth, buzz and bend. After what can only be classified as forever, the haziness is replaced by red. A red that glows nevertheless. The glowing dissipates the way we know something effervescent to dissipate. It is replaced by a static, flat Christmasy red. A red that knows its mark. A red like the red we bled when we were still free on fields. Running under mammoths fighting for the privilege of our flesh.
Regardless. The red stays the longest. It fucking placates and it believes absolutely in the sheer force of its will. Time passes. Motions. Lunar cycles. Vampiric drooling and forgetting sets in. Seasons later, the red is a faint pink. A pink like a kiss on a letter from one of our great wars. A kiss pink. A kissing pink. A slender, pleasant, all-knowing, kind pink. The pink implies the pain without the insolence of throwing it in our face. Soon it is replaced with a brazen white cicatrice. The GraceKelly of scars. A delicate incision that resembles art more than the life that brought it into being. Cauterized and gracious, the white stains our flesh and remains forever. It is the white that endures. Divorced of pain, infused with the memory and armed with the language of story it is the sole colour that has managed to encompass the fleeting nature of our delicious pain. The white remains. By the time the white comes, we've forgotten the wound without knowing we've rehearsed the story in ourselves all along. Because the story was written in us, underneath the scar. The machinations of our story have been preparing all the while and by the time we've anatomized our hurt we've cured it too.
Alas, I imagine this:
Me. White as snow all over. Fierce and uncaring. A soldier of faith. Graceful and knowing. Curious. Patient. Calm. Cool as a panther in waiting but never waiting.
All this time. Jocey wanted to be loved deeply. Deeply deeply deeply. Jocey wanted to be loved and understood and tucked in.
Ryan stood there. In his plaid. In his boxers. Sleepy.
"Joce? What are you doing up?"
It isn't enough to want to be loved. You have to want to love.
You have to want to fight.
*
Ada died selfish. Beautiful and mangled. But there was a moment.
A moment early one morning. Adam had been coughing. Fatigued, not able to see her.
She walked across three counties to get to him. Misha would have left tracks and she wasn't there to see Max.
She came to him in his fever. He was unsure if it was her face against the icy windows. She never loved him more.
She was under the branches, she was beside him, he was under the branches with her, he was beside her.
When he woke up, she began her trek back.
No words exchanged, heartbeats. Clear glass and a clear conscience.
*
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