She Lays

She lays. In the crib, the hospital-mandated plastic wall see through tall unnatural crib, perfectly pink and new with no hair and a powerful set of lungs.

She lays. In my arms, for the first time, this small creature, so weak in her new body, but with such a grip on me that she is so strong, so strong.

She lays. On her stomach, on the pale tan carpet of the living room, pulling herself forward towards some toy- I don’t know what it looks like, because all I can see is her, so strong, pulling herself, pulling.

She lays. A smile across her perfect, round face. Blonde hair, blue eyes, and the sweetest plump cheeks. Little angel child, no wings, but the cheeks are just so round.

She lays. Laughter in the air around her. Walking now, a big girl now, in big girl underwear, asking big little girl questions. Why is the sky blue? Why does the princess always marry the prince and not a different prince? She wanted to marry that prince, Arriana. Oh. Well why?

She lays. Her feet across the grass, running toward me, leaping upward, totally unbound by gravity for the briefest, briefest, best moment. Summertime means we fly kites and play hide-and-go-seek in the backyard.

She lays. The big fat bright neon headache yellow crayola marker against the sheet of white paper. The sun. You can’t draw a picture without a sun, she says, unless it is a rainy day. Plop, the marker goes, in the right-hand corner of five different sheets of paper.

She lays. Her head in my lap, because there is a movie on, and it is dark outside, and her five and a half year old self is tired, so tired, but not when I remind her that I could make popcorn, and then she is awake, and is asking to pour the kernels in, and yes, you can, Arriana, and she lays the smile across her face once again, and lays a smile against my own, and the popcorn pops.

She lays. Across the couch, eyes drifting to a midnight close, and she looks at me and raises her still so small but still so strong arms for me to put her to bed. Walking up the stairs, she clings to me as only a small child can cling to her family. It’s a language, it means I love you, even though I’m little, I love you.

She lays. Little pink bed, little pink sheets, little pink blankets, little pink pillows. A strong grip on a plump, stuffed dog.

She lays a tiny goodnight kiss on my cheek, and laughs.

Goodnight, Arriana.

baby, baby, I am in love

he tells me he loves me, only me, only the softness of my skin and the curly tendrils of blonde that attack his face as we lay in bed together
         “only you”
he tells me that he’s never done this before, never felt so deeply and got lost so completely in the everything we are
          “only you”
he tells me he loves when I laugh because each time I do he can hear every memory and see every smile he has ever brought to my face
          “only you”
he tells me this is our song and I begin to live to believe that I have finally found what I have been looking for
          “only you”
he begins to hold my hand less and leave to go home before he falls asleep more
          “only you”
he tells me he is leaving, he is sorry, but he can’t breathe when I’m around
          “only you”
he tells me I’ll be fine
                   & now it is only me without you

excerpt

His favorite time of night was when he could never really decide what color the sky was. It was velvet black, it was deep blue, it was rich purple. As he kept his head turned upwards and his eyes open to the heavens, the color kept changing and all he really wanted was to fall ino the dynamic infinity.

Robert Hass

Forty Something
She says to him, musing, “If you ever leave me;
and marry a younger woman and have another baby,
I’ll put a knife in your heart.” They are in bed,
so she climbs onto his chest, and looks directly
down into his eyes. “You understand? Your heart.”

Sonnet
A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone.
He has loved her voice and listens with attention
to every modulation of its tone. Knowing
it intimately. Not knowing what he wants
from the sound of it, from the tendered civility.
He studies, out the window, the seed shapes
of the broken pods of ornamental trees.
The kind that grow in everyone’s garden, that no one
but horticulturalists can name. Four arched chambers
of pale green, tiny vegetal proscenium arches,
a pair of black tapering seeds bedded in each chamber.
A wish geometry, miniature, Indian or Persian,
lovers or gods in their apartments. Outside, white,
patient animals, and tangled vines, and rain.

the streets have no name

There’s a lot of late nights. Each of them end with me pulling into the driveway. I park, I turn the lights off. Pull the key out of the ignition. Sit for a moment. The dark that sits outside of my house is terrifying.
I get out of my car, walk up the driveway. The feeling in my spine is always there; an itch, a sadness, a fear.

Someone is going to get me. Someone is going to grab me, hand over mouth, and pull me into the dark. Someone is going to take advantage of me. Someone is going to take all my breath away and silence me forever. Someone is going to make me cry. Someone is going to make my worst nightmares come to life.
Even when I get into the garage, the fear does not leave me. I am where I should feel safe, and my hands still tremble.

Relationships, to me, are walking up the driveway in the dark.
I’m still in the car.
& there is absolutely no one to walk me to the garage.

the product of a monday math class

The one day that I start singing that song as loud as I can inside my head, & that is the day that you reappear & my heart falters for a moment.
I refuse to believe in coincidence.
I do, however, believe in all of our yesterdays. They were brief & sweet & lovely, like an October afternoon. There is no longer any use in pining for them, longing to grasp the past & relive just one night, or one hour.
                   It is gone, I hope that you are happy. I hope that you spend most of your time    
                   smiling & falling for someone new. I hope you have someone to kiss & hold hands
                   with & sing to.
                    & I hope you remember me.
                    & I hope that it feels okay when you do.
Things are getting a lot better for me, & I wish I could tell you that, but I know that it is out of the question for right now. Maybe someday you’ll treat me the way I deserve and grant me the kindness of at least one long conversation. & if that happens? I promise, cross my heart, that I am going to tell you everything. I want to make you feel deeply every wrong feeling that you threw at me. I’ll tell you all about every single one of my tears, all their names & favorite colors, & which ones are now permanent smudges on my pillowcase you’ll get to look at me & know that it took me way too long to let you go.
                                                & you’ll know that I would do it all again if I could just to get you back.
What really kills me is that you’ll never read this & I know we won’t ever speak again like we used to. I’ll never listen to that song without my heart aching & you better never sing it and feel fully happy. I never want to sharpen this pencil again, because this is the most I’ve ever brought myself to write about you & maybe if I sleep with it under my pillow the nightmares might stop & my heart will stop hurting.

I’m so scared that I’m going to see you. I’m scared that I’ll be wearing sweatpants with my curls pulled up into a knot on the back of my head, & all of the sudden it’ll be you in front of me, which is something I have not had in quite a while.
          It scares me, because I really have no idea what will happen. We could look at each other & share a small, secret smile. We could avoid the gaze of each other’s eyes & pretend it never happened, I never knew you, we never knew each other. I could call out your name & wait for my heart to break one more time- just once more. You could take it all back & make me feel whole for the first time in months. (That won’t happen.)
I know you won’t look at me. I know you won’t.
& by the way, you’re every 11:11 wish. Every single one.
That is two times each day that I stop to think about you. Just you. Just you & every time you made me laugh, every time you sang to me, every time our skin touched, every time you made my heart race, every hug, every kiss, everything.
                              The day we met, the day I fell for you.
                                                   Everything.
                              The day you left.
                                                   Everything.

Thank you for being in my life for as long as it lasted.

anything looks peaceful from 1,353 feet

Will our story ever end? I thought it was over so many times before. You had left me & taken the best of out love with you. All I had left was empty memories & old notebooks.
          & then, like magic, you came back to me.
It was the strangest feeling. It was like I had been drowning & all of the air had left my lungs & I was dead. But then the sun hit my body & cured me of the cold, & I was warm & whole & alive again. When you are brought back to life from something like that, you live with a renewed energy & you love with a fervor that you did not know before. So in my revival, I fell in love & gladly wore a blindfold of trust & let you drag me deeper into the story of me & you.
          & then, a punch to the stomach.
                                       You left me again.
The pain was so much more worse this time. It was worse because it hit hard & fast & heavy, exactly what I no longer had & the crippling, staggering effect that it had on everything I was. But when you lied & told me that you really did still love me- that was my downfall. Because I let myself believe it, & I let myself believe that everything would get better. Seven days later, and you were with her. You were with her & I was at the bottom of the ocean, & sharks were the least of my worries. 
I continued my stifled breathing underwater until you pulled out a ring & asked her to marry you.
          Then I really was dead.
                   & then, like magic, you came back to me. This time was so much less magical. 
                             & it was hardly a heartbeat or a flutter of eyelashes.
                   & then, like magic, you came back to me.
                            & told me that I was the one & that you loved me.
No one has pulled me out of the ocean yet, and you wonder why I am so still, cold and blue to you.

happy, or not?

Maybe you have to be perfectly miserable in order to be perfectly happy.

“Carrie and Mr. Big are still together.”

In Sex & the City (the book, not the hit HBO series that I am absolutely addicted to), it didn’t appear that there was any hope for Carrie and Big. But no- flip to the epilogue and you will find that unbelievable little sentence. “Carrie and Mr. Big are still together.” Sure, I’m okay with that. That’s how the show ends. It’s how it was always meant to be. But throughout the entire book, these two characters were projected as almost completely apathetic to each other and were not illustrated as if there were any lasting qualities to their affections. That’s not how true love is. True love isn’t apathy; true love doesn’t leave your stomach hurting.

So what does this mean for those of us living outside of the pages of crisp library books? Is it possible to live your life in a relationship that has your feet nailed to the floor beneath you, but still end up with a happily ever after? Or is the fact that “Carrie and Mr. Big are still together” just making a statement about how easily we allow for ourselves to get trapped in situations and relationships that are more apt to destroy us in the end than make us happy and provide us with what we really want?

I guess what it really comes down to is whether or not you’re happy. And as long as all of the happy outweighs all of the bad, then everything is okay. But when the scales start to tip the other way, and the nightmares and stomach aches start to hang around more than the butterflies and smiles…
                                                      Well, you know what comes next. And it isn’t pretty. And it hurts and it rips your heart out, and you wish you could change the circumstances of the situation, but the fact of the matter is that you can only give so much of yourself, and if that isn’t enough, then you need to find someone new to appreciate who you are and what you have to give.

Maybe you have to be perfectly miserable in order to realize what it is going to take to make you perfectly happy.

just song lyrics, but they feel like so much more.

And it starts, sometime around midnight. Or at least that’s when you lose yourself for a minute or two. As you stand under the bar lights, and the band plays some song about forgetting yourself for a while, and the piano’s this melancholy soundtrack to her smile, and that white dress she’s wearing; you haven’t seen her for a while. But you know, that she’s watching. She’s laughing, she’s turning. She’s holding her tonic like a crux. The room’s suddenly spinning. She walks up and asks how you are. So you can smell her perfume. You can see her lying naked in your arms. And so there’s a change, in your emotions. And all these memories come rushing like feral waves to your mind, of the curl of your bodies, like two perfect circles entwined. And you feel hopeless and homeless and lost in the haze of the wine. Then she leaves, with someone you don’t know, but she makes sure you saw her. She looks right at you and bolts. As she walks out the door, your blood boiling, your stomach in ropes. Oh and when your friends say, “What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Then you walk, under the streetlights, and you’re too drunk to notice that everyone is staring at you. You just don’t care what you look like. The world is falling around you. You just have to see her. You just have to see her. You just have to see her. You just have to see her. You just have to see her. You know that she’ll break you in two.

please say you do not mind

 

At this moment, sitting in my room, with this sad song playing out of worn out computer speakers, and no one to keep my company but a cat, I remember what alone feels like.
Hello, it has been quite a while.
Being alone is one thing, but the alone feeling that is draped over me like a thick wool blanket- it smothers. It suffocates. It’s itchy, and all you want to do is escape, but you need someone else to pull it off of you, because it is just far too heavy for one to tackle on one’s own. I can do nothing to save myself. In the past, there were months and months of this feeling. And now that I can look upon my experiences and relate them to the present, I’m realizing that this lonely feeling is really just a miserable process of waiting. I’ve never had much patience, and when I’m required to practice the art of sitting around, tapping my feet, and watching the clock, it makes me miserable.
The fact of the matter is, I know that someone is going to come into my life and shake things up. I know what comes next. I know that my suffering will be rewarded.
But the pain of patience? It is unbearable.

The worst of the situation is that the waiting isn’t what is hurting me the most. It’s the loss. The devastating, heartbreaking, temporary- but somehow still paralyzing in nature- loss.
I can’t say anything more about it.

Sympathy isn’t what I want, but what I do want is someone to save me. Sometimes it feels like far too much to ask for.