Tomorrow
It's posturing, I know. "I could find another you tomorrow."
I swallow a grimace, my eyes drawn to the wall, fingers slack on my phone.
"I could have as many girls as I wanted by tomorrow."
I nod, unmoving. But the thing, dead and un-beating in my chest stirs uncomfortably.
"I've dated a writer, I'm already immortalized."
I clench my jaw, wondering when my words became so meaningless.
"You never said sorry when I was hurt."
I know that isn't true. But what is to kick a rock in a river, other than to look stupid? I am aware of my wrong doings, and yet there has always been more wrong. In my tone, in my manner of feeling.
"You're way more emotionally immature." No, because I do not talk like this.
My cadence is easy when I speak, my eyes hardened in my reflection and my words carefully picked over. "Okay. If that is what you believe." and I respond with such a draw string reaction each time, that I notice each irritated teeth click and memorize each draw of the brows, like perhaps I could be understood through a screen.
Only when ive had enough, when that dead, un-beating thing chest stirs do I say I am going, and that is when something is obviously wrong. I say "think about it." they say, "Can you communicate for once?"
But perhaps, tomorrow, I should care to.
W(h)ine
I drink wine,
it's percent less then three but I feel it anyway.
I feel it like my mother kissing my cheek, cabernet on her breath.
I feel it in the way my grandmother tends to the buckets in her garage,
purple staining her hardwood I clean best I can when it overturns.
I taste it's flavour thick as I grimace through my night,
head clouded but senses on a dime.
I know if I should die, I would be missed.
I whine.
I whine, and I whine, but I am on the back foot and unsure how to get better.
I try. I drink, and I try again.
Father, Father...
Who can love anger?
I destroyed childhood toy castles,
as my father did his own.
He was my best friend,
until his canines were sharp in the side of my neck.
A lone wolf, killing its cub.
I am nothing but broken pieces,
and as I hold my child I could never imagine
shredding the bloom of the seed you sowed.
I still feel it deep in my bones,
hammering like he did the door when drunk.
I wish to pierce holes in you,
as he did switchblades to drywall.
But I know I cannot. I can never be so angry to kill a child's soul.
But I hug him with loose arms, and I absorb his warmth and tears to the crown of my head he used to kiss.
I forgive him as a child,
but I will never forgive being a fear-soaked child, shaking and stripped of a father.
Souls
I am a solemn individual,
filled with horrible memories that were made to bend, not to build.
I still persist, like a horrible ache in your back you try to fix.
I am made of scar tissue and blood. Blood spilled from my own flesh, covered with thin bands of reminders of those moments. I don't think there is an inch of my forearms unmarred, and I can see the visible indents on my thigh if it gets hot enough.
Still, I persist. In this body that once housed a little girl ever so loved, and a teenager ever so traumatized and darkened in her soul.
I remain every bit them both, whilst making room for who I am now. They like to make their appearances, and while it is exhausting housing so many beings, I appreciate their vitality.
Should I not have that child within me I would not find such love within a body of water, nor how the sun reflects on its bumps. I doubt id care so much for my family in the way I do now, pouring every hour and breath I have into each gift given for the holidays.
Should I not have my teen, I imagine id be very dull. I wouldn't be so resilient, I wouldn't be so sure-footed. I would not have saved as many lives as I did knowing those struggling as well as myself at an early age.
But I house those souls, too- the ones in the in-between. My preteen self, my early twenties that feel much more like something else rather than adulthood.
I house them, as they are my creativity. I speak to you now through that unsure middle plane of being twenty-two, longing to be an author and yet unsure. Struck between a broke addiction or complete loneliness.
I am a house of memories. A mind that builds and bends. And I love each inhabitant, and cherish their souls so long forgotten or marred by times cruel freezer; forever holding them within the gaze of those who did not see her. Did not see me.
The Glass Cage
The room was dark. Barely visible out of where I sit, alone in the middle of a room I can't tell if there's an end to its vast darkness, no matter how hard I squinted or tilted my head to make out shadows and imaginative images. Like birds outside a bedroom window, or tooth fairy money beneath a sleeping childs head. Perhaps, even salt on lips from chips, or a teenagers first shot of liquor followed by disgustingly sweet candy in the form of water. I was like a shrouded veil of death all around me. Thick, suffocating. It had been succumbing me to nothing but the uncomfortable ticking of my internal clock for years. And all I could do was listen to its hand-grenade rythym, in silent plea it would not burst from my slightest movement.
I wasn't a formidable child. Not one that was especially gifted in arts, science, or music. I was god awful at anything academic. But I enjoyed the fine arts, anyway. Sound engineering, when able to in senior years, band. I loved English class but I wasn't good with words. I got C's because where I live, that's the lowest grade possible. I could not fail, though it always felt as if I would.
And I lived all those years; my school-age, working age, innocence and rebellion and subsequent illness I fostered just to end up in a cage of someone else's creation. No blanket, or pillow. Nothing to relieve myself in, or to hide away beneath, besides the thin cloth you would find on someone in hospital. It was itchy; stained with sweat and regret. Regret, I allowed my morbid fixation to set on a woman who seemed ever charismatic, with teeth charming as a flank of knives and eyes like those of a shark. Iris' polluted with passive ghosts of loves long, long gone. Ones who probably faced the same captivity I do.
My captor is sickengingly sweet in appearance. But as soon as they step down into the shroud of screaming and thrashing, they become violence. Silent sedation. Something disgusting yet elegant enough to appear as a born again virgin.
Ive been called a lot of things. A liar, an abuser, a manipulator. Terrible. Disgusting. And far, far worse I cannot utter in fear of what would become of me. But my captor's tongue is soft in its lashings-- promising if I don't talk, I will be good. Good, good good. How do I be good?
I went through a lot. Although, no one seemed to care.
Perhaps if they had bared witness to the words thrown at me, they would hurt for me. Or perhaps it would start creating horns and a tail and fangs on my frame. I am not quite sure. But I never run out of time to think. Although, it is certainly warbled in its comprehension.
The first time I thought I was loved, it was a morbid fixation. Someones sick obsession to fix me. As though I was broken. I was not. I was just terrified. Hurt. And she took that, and ran.
She had been my best friend. Brunette with streaks of red in her hair, brilliant blue eyes and a love of equestrian animals. But she changed. Perhaps it was who she had always been, anyway. If I think hard enough, I get flashes like a heat stroke of me eating a sweaty cheese sandwich my mother had packed hastily- caring for three children with a full time job- and this pyro in flesh had thrown books at me. Those hardcover science books that would creak like the bones of a undisturbed body if I attempted to open one. My neck would snap to the right, as tens of people watched on, unsure as to what to do. I loved her despite.
She broke her knee later in the month, an equestrian she had raised who had bucked up against her. I held the door open to the bathroom. She told me to go fuck myself. Not in jester. Her words were thick with venom. I cowered against the door, as I stood dutifully as she did what she needed. Later, she would press a kiss to my forehead and tell me I am so good to her.I loved her because.
She shoved me against the lockers after class. I had tears on my cheeks and she laughed. I was bruised, and she was amused.
I tried to kill myself. She got a restraining order and I was nearly sent to a school for the criminally insane. Her mother was a lawyer on the school board. My elementary salaried mother could not do anything. I was stuck.
I then fell for a shadow of a nobody. A girl who lived in squalor. I loved her despite her broken down home. The child who was only 3 in a diaper and nothing else wondering the street as my father picked me up.
I missed New Years- the last my entire family would spend together to be with her. I claimed her as my own flesh and blood-- I cleaned up the mess the 3 year old made in the bathroom when she was busy cleaning up the mess her drunkered of a mother was preoccupied with.
Two months later, she raped me. Ate McDonalds as I sobbed in her shit-stained wall bathroom, trying to clear the blood.
I fell in love with the girl I took to my high school graduation event. She liked frozen, organic blueberries. They had to be organic. because they were small and sour. She cheated on me with my best friend for months, then him with me although I did not realize. He knew. He said I shouldn't be angry at him. But I was. he asked me for beers. I poured it down the front of his trousers and then skulled a bitters.
I had several flings. Another girl- rich and two years younger. A lovely family and many things I could only hope to own, like a VR set with a game of the open deep sea. She was the deep sea. A girl that cheated and attempted to harm herself due to me leaving. It was sick.
Then a girl with dark hair, dark liner and a foot taller than me. She was never kind. But I was drawn. In the span of three months, she cheated on me twice, and assaulted a minor. She claimed the minor assaulted her, so she changed her name and fled the town. Disgusting, woman.
But I met her best friend. The love of my life, I think. She asked me to finish a beer she stole from her father. It was completely full, an hour into the party. She hated beer. She didn't look at me except when eating chicken nuggets- so my best friend said. This girl looked at me like I hung the sun.
I kissed her on a windy rooftop beneath the moon and coddled by stars.
That loving girl who hated beer began to hate me, and threw things. Punched things near me. She claimed I cheated when I was assaulted, again, because I was a body with a heart on the outside of my chest cavity.
I found rebounds. Then met a woman I truly was infatuated with. She was gorgeous, a makeup artist with a confident personality. So confident, she strung me along for months, and on my birthday my father paid for our hotel stay and dinner. That dinner, she told me how she had sex with all of her friends and did not understand why I would be upset. It wasn't her sexual experience, rather the fact it was my birthday she chose to tell tales of scorned lovers and steamed car windows.
Several hours later, she asked me to be hers.
I didn't realize she raped me the first time we met until the month we broke up.
I met a friend. She told everyone I lied about every disease I ever had. Health problems, mental health, familial abuse.I cried.. She did not care. I remained her friend for months. And she introduced me to two other friends.
I was raped twice at one of my new friends homes. She did not care. She wanted attention and to hangout. Did not care I was assaulted.
The girl I cared for for so long, who hurt me neverendingly, left me day after I was assaulted. She said I cheated. She wanted to get back together a few days later, but my grandma had died In that time. First death in my life. I told her i couldn't. She cried and told me I was awful.
I told her I was ready two weeks later. She had already slept and started falling for someone new. I saw it on her lockscreen as we remained friends. I cried, panicked as she was in the shower. Another love, starlit girl, told me to leave. I couldn't. I still loved this awful woman.
I had a new friend. Or old. I knew her since high school. Defended her as people made fun of her although I did not know her. Invited her into my life. Introduced her to my girlfriend. She chose that girl despite my trauma.
And so she began to suicide-threatening me. On, and on. For days and hours. Called me endlessly. Made fake accounts to contact me if i didn't respond. When I blocked her, she messaged me from a texting app to bypass the block. I felt deeply sick. I didn't have time to file a police report. She had said i threatened her life.
Murders of murders, living in fear. Perhaps I deserved this. But i never threatened her. i was stuck. Lost. My first love has returned.
The shadows gave way. Deep blue walls-- they are there--, empty liquor cans on an oak tablestand my brother had built me. I could nearly hear a sonneta being played on a piano nearby. I was drunk. So late, or so early. Nothing, or nothing at all, became my life.
I had not been kidnapped by a person. Only, ever, my own mind. Forever just that.
I pushed my worn down notebook away-- illegible even to me, as if i wrote it with a backward hand to be proofread by eyes not my own
My body felt raw, skinned. I just want to be human. But i live within my own imprisonment of ghostly remnants, replaying and replaying ever endly.
"juliette? Time for lunch!' My dear, overworked mother yelled from upsitars.
And came the infinite near. Twilight. Finally, the night and day remembered i existed.
Letter 3
I was diagnosed with BPD, panic disorder, major anxiety disorder, and two eating disorders by 16. I fell in love in that time, with my best friend. I wrote a book about it, if you'd like to know deep detail. Anyway, I loved her from the moment we met. A phenomenon for BPD people is having a favourite person, or FP, and she was mine. From the moment I saw her, like one of those cliche stories where you just know youre in love because the world fades away. But it isn't romantic. It is torrential and tumultuous and horrid. My very life depended on her. We absued each other in many ways, her family targeted me and tried to have me shipped off to a school for the criminally insane and I was under the scope of too many adults who'd come to my home bearing gifts of letters written by their daughters blaming me for everything wrong with them. That destroyed me. My mother eventually took to burning them. We didn't have the money to sue. We didn't have the power or resources they did. So I attempted suicide in the change rooms.
After the abuse and before the perception. Pills in my body, writhing on the bench. I don't remember anything past ambulances and stomaching pumping and charcoal down my nose. I don't remember much of any of that time because I quickly turned to drugs. Cutting with refined blades. Destroying myself how everyone else ever has.
I was eventually forced, with stipulation of returning to school into dialectical behavioural therapy, group therapy and personal therapy three times a week. I was put on my first medications, and I hated it.
It saved me. It changed my brain chemistry and I got better. Not cured- you cant cure BPD, just manage it. And I didn't really manage it, but I did much better than I used to. I was still a horror to know- manipulative, selfish, uncaring, emotionally abusive. Id date people I never loved or was attracted to for attention, and threatened suicide when they left and all but physically stalked them. I called these trysts family, and abandoned my own. The people who were there and loved me because they had fallen apart and were struggling and I could not be suffocated by the pain of it all.
So I swallowed liquor and smoked and took things from people I didn't know just to dull the bluntness of life.
It was a horrible time. Until a few years ago, really. I traumatized so many people but refused to accept responsibility. I would hurt people and blame them for tiny faults in the grand scheme. I chose the wrong people to care for. The wrong people to trust.
And I spent many of those months in doctors offices, and within white walls barred off with prison doors and limited visitors who couldnt look me in the eye. I expected too much from children- that friends would visit me in a terrifying ward after doing something they couldnt comprehend. I made it their issue. I made it anyones I could. I bled, and I bled, and I took pills and cried until I was a shell of that little wrinkly, wet baby.
I hated everyone. Because I hated me.
I grit my teeth remembering these things. I have been told for years by numerous people I should write a memoir because the things I told them were unbelievable. And I don't know if I will ever be able to rip off the scab on my heart and talk about them properly, so for now I give you this.
Im still not okay. Because I have sick family members and a broken heart from too many things to count and though my tattoos cover most of the past, when its hot the past raises on my flesh and I can feel it. It's tangible and horribly in reach. But I am doing better. I went to University though I was told I never would. Ive found people who love me, as fleeting as they may be, despite being told no one would. I let people touch me despite the trauma. I take my medications- five times different from the original, but they work. And I haven't hurt myself in almost two years. I am not kind to myself, but I am lenient. I am trying. And I am so grateful for my family and loved ones and I will get better, because at this very moment I have never been so good.
I still feel like a little girl, trapped in a body I never properly learned to conduct so every sound is a jagged note. But I try.
Letter 2
Ive attempted suicide several times. More importantly- I wanted the morning from 7 to a half past free, so I slept in my school uniform. I kept a butter knife stuffed into the plush of one of my teddy's, and would use that to nervously drag across my skin. Never enough to even cause a hairline wound. I was so disappointed in myself. I spent the mornings on the way to school reading fan fiction in the backseat, which I suppose is to thank for my adoration of writing now. I had a hairbrush that I would rake through the front strands and leave the back a matted nest for months. I would throw water on the back to tame the breakage, and a girl once asked me "Why are you wet?" with such horror and id insist I wasn't, despite the dark spots on my shoulders and back from where my hair laid and the tiles of the bathroom splattered with water.
I didn't have a good elementary experience. I was mute till fourth grade, whispering my answers to questions to the TA assigned to me for class questions or only speaking to my family. I was bullied mercilessly for being too big, or too slow, or too dumb. Roll around 6th grade, and I decided to use a third party texting app to target three of my bullies.I remember the day I decided, I was laying on my left side on my iPod and it clicked- make a fake instagram to torment my classmates. I used the alias 'A' since Pretty Little Liars was the hype of fifth grade, and I thought it worked. I remember standing outside, just on the edge of the group of popular kids or the soccer kids to hear them chatting about the show. Something clicked. Something different, wrong. I never said much mean, either that I was watching or on special occasion 'Unhappy birthday' which struck painfully for a young girl. I wrote a swear word on the whiteboard in permanent ink since I got to school early.
They had a cop come in, and ask the hypothetical of what if they took all our phones and knew who did it? But my iPod was at home. I smirked to myself, I remember, and some poor girl lower on the wrung than me freezed up and everyone hooked their talons into her.
It was revealed to be me. The teacher tried to have me expelled. The priest said we were Catholic and I was just a child who deserved a second chance. Not a great man, but kind in his regard to me that day. I offered up my sexuality as leverage, or apology.
I told my mother it was the evil bunny, because I was on my iPod one day and I saw this image of a fluffy white bunny looking in the mirror and seeing a distorted mirror image.
My family was starting to fall apart, too. Mental health issues I won't divulge and divorce. The usual pain of family. So I tried the butter knife. It didn't work. I found cracking the shell of my brothers shaving razor worked, and used that. Never do that, please. It has scarred me for life, no matter the tattoos or makeup or ointments. You may think you'll like it, be happy for it, not live long enough to see it- but you will live long enough, and you will hate it. A stark reminder of these kinds of cruel times.
And at some point, I downloaded Skout. I was looking for friends- though I did meet one who has been a friend for half my life, I also was abused and assaulted multiple times until horrifying things occurred. I was made to cut myself, send inappropriate things, do horrible things to myself a CHILD should not have to do. But I was threatened. I was scared.
And it changed my mind forever.
Letter 1
I was born 6lbs 4oz on November 9th.
My mother never cared for gender reveals- so I was a surprise. Welcome and warm, like a gift of pyjamas on a cold day. My grandma says she prayed id be a little girl, so perhaps it was a gift or fate, or natural biology. Who can say. I was born at exactly 4 am that Friday morning, wrinkly and wet with a birth mark on my neck the same as every blood relative on my mother's side. I joked in my late teens about the theory that birth marks were how you died in a past life, and how we all must have been stabbed. No one ever laughed, telling me off for it, but I found it funny. My father went to retrieve my big brothers from home- 7 and 4 sometime that early morning, and at the top of my childhood stairs they stood excitedly bouncing on the tips of their toes, wide eyed and waiting.
"You have a baby sister!" My father proudly said as he entered the door, knowing they'd be there waiting. My aunt beamed from behind the boys, with a boy and girl of her own. My younger-older brother grinned best he could after having his mouth frozen at the dentist, while the eldest grit his teeth and bared an awkward smile.
"That's great." He said, elongating every word like it was an inconvenience.
Bastard. I showed him, I did. He got one look at me nestled under a yellow pleated blanket, and his heart stopped and remolded to always protect. He wore a badge that said his name, followed by Big Brother beneath that he never took off as he sauntered around the hospital halls with my carrier. He refused to stop holding me- was by my side the entire time I was home, for many months.
He would not stop playing Yellow by Coldplay, and in the interim would sing Wonderful World. Both brothers were by me constantly, enticing me in games and hurriedly assuaging my wailing with their own toys. They bought me birthday gifts and would try to outdo each other by goading my attention with shiny wrapping and baby voices. I honestly preferred the decrepit doll I had in my fist instead, blank in the eyes and creepily dressed akin to a victorian child.
My mother adored me. Of course she did. I was her baby- and her baby girl. The youngest and last of my grandmothers grandchildren, her grand shields as she'd call us in our broken English. We learned Portuguese as easily as English, adoring her from the moment we woke to the moment we slept. We would shuttle our Christmas gifts to her as if they were her own, and she would warm our hearts with a bone-crushing hug and peppering of kisses. We got fed as soon as we got the all clear for solids, soup and egg yolks drenched in sugar for dipping with our full-fat bread and very quickly, the stapled family Mac and Cheese (which I have now weaselled the recipe from her to hold over my brothers heads).
My father loved me too. His little girl. Daddy's girl very quickly, bought by huge lollipops only bought from an island two hours away and sneaky nights on the porch with a bag of lays and a bottle of vinegar for the sauce. Disgusting now, but startlingly exquisite in my early years.
My younger-older brother had a magnet calendar on the fridge with every month being a new dog. One month, im unsure which, was a picture of a Springer laying on the grass. He was transfixed, insisting we got her. So my parents got him the Bible of Dogs where he could learn everything about every breed, but he never strayed from his chosen dog. The name Holly was listed beneath the picture of the dog on the calendar, and that was that. We got her on a rainy spring day. It was overcast, and we had to drive several anticipatory hours to get where we were meeting the kennel owner. I remember standing on the gravel, wide eyed as he unlocked the back of the truck and I saw my dog's whole family. A senior, with sad eyes gazing up at me from where they rested their face on their paws, two bigger puppies in one crate and a crate with a lineup of at minimum six small Spaniels. I remember feeling a pang of sadness for these poor dogs- all sequestered to the cold, dark trunk without so much as a blanket. But I was 7, and unaware of anything except the two circular dog cages being set up. The owner set a puppy in each, and my brother who had wanted the dog flocked to the left towards our Holly. Our baby. She shivered on my baby blanket in the back, my brother stroking her neck with a featherlight touch and me twisted around to stare at her in wonderment. That wonderment turned to fear, as she got older and more rambunctious and could knock me over with a twist of her head.
My childhood was one of love, light and joy. My brothers would line up outside my door to give me a payment- listerine strips most commonly- just to watch a movie in my bed with me. The other brother would stand diligently outside my door on their DS waiting their turn for the 90 minutes. My cousin, my aunts only girl, was my sister and mentor in so many ways. We spilled tears in laughter over a Farm game where the horse could talk, and awkwardly averted our gazes on the shared lounge chair during the twilight sex scene. She was the first to ever straighten my curls, and was excruciatingly patient despite how annoying I could get. My other cousin would get fed up quickly, and devolve into video games with my eldest brother while the rest of us were sequestered to watching. When my brother and cousin got their first phones, I was left out. My cousin showed me her phone though, and it made it all the better before our special New Years dinners where we would quickly get overheated in my grandma's basement suite, and on Easter we would find a ziplock of chocolate eggs and a twenty dollar bill. Never the parents though, just the grand shields, and my grandma would offer us a rare smile and twinkle in her dark eyes that promised a lifetime of adoration.
Then, I turned 13.
Loathe
How do you forgive someone you hate?
Devastation yawns like a great, gasping pit in my chest.
My head aches, but it's better than heartache which I'm also inexplicably stricken with for a lifetime.
I blame you- so I try to break your every heart beat.
I loathe me, so I soothe with deep cuts and remember every horrible thing I've done,
anticipating every bad dream before it happens.
A psychic for psyche dysfunction. An unholy union, my heart and mind.
Constantly warring- neither winning, leaving the other side bedraggled and begrudging.
Complex
She can't offer me more then kisses on the floor,
liquor sticking to my jeans and tongue.
I swallow down the feeling thick in my throat at the nauseating flavour of tobacco clinging to my canines,
focused instead on skin beneath my fingertips marred with scars and makeup.
She focuses on me when she talks,
so much so she doesnt know how close the cigarette is to burning her fingers,
but I keep my eyes watching a thick buildup of ash form.
Knowing I waste away much the same beneath her, tempting only on nights like this.
I try not to pay too much attention to fickle fingers fiddling with it,
or I'll never be able to focus again.
She won't ever want me- but it's nice when she drinks enough to think she might.