How Pathetic. To Spend My Days Reassuring Myself That They Are Not Wasted, All The While Wasting Them
How pathetic. To spend my days reassuring myself that they are not wasted, all the while wasting them in trivial debates with the wretched thing in the mirror about the very topic. Why I should answer to her, I do not know. She is the opposite of me. Her left eye is where my right is, and her right eye is where my left is. Her hair is parted on the wrong side, her college chosen wrong, her days spent mindlessly, her work set to waste, what a rotten thing she is. I know who I am. And it isn't her. It can't be. Or every poor thing I think of myself would be true.
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I can’t explain the joy I feel. And isn’t that so wonderful isn’t that so perfect to have a problem doppled in sugar and cherries with pits you suck on until they are bare in your mouth.
I don’t mind when her leather jacket burns my finger tips, that’s just the summer sun gettin’ jealous of us making love in this old red truck. A lick of hell on the way to heaven don’t scare me. Only being without her does.
-Confessions of a Southern Belle
Living in an anxious mind, I know fear intimately, I know nervousness like a favorite cousin-always sitting by me at dinner, insisting we stay in to watch movies instead of go out for dessert because when we go out I don’t enjoy myself at all. Too worried about the drive home, where I’ll park, all the trivial details that make it so I can’t taste the ice cream anyways. And don’t mistake me, I favor my fear just as much as it favors me. It keeps me comfortable, and how I love to be comfortable, though it’s a shaking uneasy kind of comfort. The sort a doomed man has on death row.
Taken by the wind’s sweet pressure on my face, I am swept to the little church on the hill. Sugar atomized in the air; footsteps bringing life to the silent cedar floorboards, nothing felt simpler than there. My eyes are sealed as I soak in the feeling, finding a smile in the blustery darkness.
Facism rises, having not been put down. Like hot air in feverish men’s chests, pounding their rib cage with the old adage, me before all, me before all.
I thought if I could redeem something in him I could redeem something in me, too. But I failed us both. He is not a project, and I cannot be healed vicariously. The only path we can take here, is forward.
With glass in our soles, tearing us apart and revealing us at the same time. Forward.
I’ll figure it out, I always figure it out. Why not now? What’s wrong with me?
Nothing. Maybe this is a problem that can’t be solved. Not even by you.
Her cupids bow dips to her bottom lip, drawn constantly, words seldom loosed. I tease laughter from her with my foolishness, and every time her mouth opens another of love’s arrows is fired at me, and if I am a soldier, I am one who so longs to be struck down, I am one who would never raise a shield against her.
—Diary of a Siren
Her photo bends white at the creases, opened and closed a thousand times, my memories dull and taper away. I think of her. And I wonder what parts of her face I’ve forgotten in my desperate plea to remember every freckle on it.
The stars will not judge me. They knew me before I was an atom of an idea, and they brought me here to this moment now, in something I cannot imagine as anything else but an act of love.
