2011

2010

Don’t Come Back

On a Tuesday morning in a New York University dorm room, I woke up in pain,

bleeding all over my bed sheets and traced the trail of blood with my fingers to a slit on

the left side of my chest. Groggy memories hovered by my head from some half-sleep-

moments; a sneaky smile, slick knife and clammy hands grasping that pulsing organ… I

got up only to buckle over and clutch the hollow wound that wasn’t even there. I knew

that none of this was real, that I was alive, with atria and ventricles pumping oxygen in

blood cells to all my organs. My clothing was clean and so was my bed, yet my mind

insisted that someone had brutally torn out my heart. I was terrified. This was just a

reaction to a phone conversation that I had the night before with a very recently ex-

boyfriend. It was terrifying because it was not the first time that someone had hurt me so

bad.

A year and a half before, I left my childhood home for another country. It was as

if my whole life up until then was spent surviving. Buried in the trenches of my bedroom,

or dragging myself across the woodwork of my living room floor, hiding from my

mother’s cackle and claws. I was haunted by daily flashbacks. Every stair railing

smacked with the day she pushed her dense bones against my petite frame that squirmed

to slip up to my room. Every carpet shrieked with my wheezy gasps that ripped out of

me the day I pleaded for her bulk to press off my lungs. Every clump of clothing rang of

the day she stole and hid my phone so that I could not call for help. The day she called

her friends to tell how I tore her wardrobe apart trying to find it. “Look how she wrecks

her own mothers things” the clothing whispered “look how she imagines that her mother

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stole. Listen to her delusional cries.” Until the day I left that home, every minute was

engulfed in anticipation, wisps of played out avoidance tactics spun like cotton candy in

my mind. All the while I slipped in and out of a suicidal slumber, with inconsistent

strength to leave the cover of my sheets.

When I finally left for my gap year, I arrived in Israel and was alive for the first

time in my life. Then I returned home for my sister’s bat-mitzvah, my mother brutally

tore out my heart and I went back to Israel a walking corpse.

This was the first time I experienced the feeling that someone had taken my heart.

The reappearance of this image was very unsettling. I don’t understand why this happens

to me. What do I do wrong that exposes me to such pain?

In childhood and adolescence I would give my mother my heart because I so

longed for her to cradle it. She would hand it back with arrows stuck in and stab wounds.

After my heart healed I would forget and hand it to back to her again. Then she would

hand it back with arrows stuck in and stab wounds. So when it was finally time to leave

home to another country I vowed to my mother that I would never speak to her again and

she dare not visit me or I would announce to the entire school everything that she’d done

in something resembling a hear-ye-proclamation from the middle-ages.

I thought I’d done all I could to protect myself. She could no longer treat me

horribly and still reap the comfort of feeling like a loved mother because of those

inevitable moments when I would let her in. I would no longer fall prey to the innocent

desire for a good relationship that would occasionally creep up and coerce me into

responding fondly to her good moods, into handing her my heart again. But in just one

weekend, my sister’s bat mitzvah, I was forced to have friendly conversation with her in

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a public crowd. When she forced even that subtle amount of affection from me it was like

she grabbed my heart from my chest and began to stroke it, to use it to comfort herself

against my will.

Why did my conversation with my ex-boyfriend trigger the same image? There

does seem to be a parallel. When I had first met him, I was cold and withheld affection

because I wanted to test his hands before I trusted him with my heart. I needed to be sure

that he would handle it with care and not hand it back with arrows stuck in and stab

wounds. Like my mother, his kind words suggested the hope that someone might cradle

my heart, something I seem to long for so desperately. Could it be that this desire is a

flaw and leads me to be lulled too easily into handing over my most vital organ? I did not

do a very good job of judging him. The honeymoon phase of relationship did not last

long. Long distance, I would call from New York to Los Angeles. After only a few weeks

he began to insult and ridicule my values, criticize main parts of my personality and

insult my beliefs. I began to feel the threat of arrows stuck in and stab wounds, but every

time we spoke again I would forget or rationalize away my fears, and hand him my heart.

Am I too desperate to be loved that I am careless with my own heart? Perhaps I

forgive and love too easily. I did feel free when we finally ended. It was a good to be rid

of a relationship that I let hurt and burden me. I could breathe and expand my lungs and

body, appreciating that I was no longer constricting myself with thoughts of him or what

he might think of me. But when he called the night before Tuesday morning, just to talk,

because we said that we would still be friends, his sweet voice lured me into being

friendly. I listened as the topics morphed and he began tracing the downfall of our

relationship, and he told me that he would only be upset if I grew to resent him and that

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he still planned to visit me when he came to New York for winter break. I assured him

not to worry, that the end of the relationship was no one’s fault, then the conversation

morphed and we hung up many minutes later.

I went to sleep and woke up Tuesday morning, imagination telling me that my

heart had been brutally removed.

It had happened again. I was wounded by a loved one and then took back my

heart for keeps. Then, in one simple conversation, I gave it up again. I promised that I

wouldn’t resent him. Though it’s true that the love giving wasn’t forced like it was with

my mother, the parallel still felt real enough to manifest itself in the same metaphorical

thought language. He could feel comforted, knowing that I did not harbor any ill feelings

towards him. He could revel in the fact that I still cared for him. He could even come and

visit me, have someone to entertain him as he passed through New York City during his

winter break. Just like with my mother, someone was feeling my love while I didn’t get

to feel theirs. Do I really have no control over who I love? Is there no way to protect my

heart?Christina Perri explores a similar image in her song “Jar of Hearts”

And who do you think you are?

Runnin' 'round leaving scars

Collecting your jar of hearts

…

So don't come back for me

Don't come back at all

She captures the terror that I felt when I woke up and realized that I had given

away my heart to be broken again. The speaker of Perri’s lyrics condemns a lover,

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possibly an ex-lover who collects hearts in a jar. If he were to take the heart of the

speaker, she would be trapped, forced to care for him while he might not reciprocate. But

she confronts the boy who threatens her, telling him not to come back for her.

I used to think that the hurt from my mother would make me guard my heart too

much. But perhaps from that lack of love I now seek a deep emotional connection so

hastily that I give my heart away with no caution.

Tonight I see his name on the buddy-list sidebar of my G-mail. I eye the calendar

on my wall and wonder if he will end up visiting me in the last week of December. Wisps

of played out scenarios spin like cotton candy in my mind. I lay with my stomach flat on

my bed sheets and clutch the left side of my chest and feel atria and ventricles pumping

oxygen in blood cells to all my organs. I feel the vulnerability of my most vital organ and

remember the days of arrows stuck in and stab wounds. I should spend my time testing

other hands with a very critical eye and not give my heart to someone who I know will

hurt it. But when he loved me it was beautiful.

A Letter to NYU

Dear NYU,

Today I will take these fingers, clip clap them on this board and rewrite my

writing until I’m bored. Then I will sit and sip the letters in like wine, stirring the glass to

evaporate the bad and let the good sink in like warmth.

As a baby I slapped my lips together and refused let any word pass until my mind

mastered full sentences. It’s true. I used to be mute. But in that silence I gained the gust

to send my tongue flapping like a deranged soggy goose. I squawked so loud that

language itself must have heard. I think she sits on my shoulders now, caressing me for

my mating call.

Then my size shifted, my father began to travel and my mother became mean.

Those years were like a set change only the actor never moved or wanted to notice. But

now there was a script. Superman was always flying away and Cruella Deville acquired a

taste for the pelt of her own children. I remember crouching my legs into the airplane seat

on the way back from a family vacation scribbling with a severity that no middle school

student should own. “Never forget, never forget, never forget”, was the underlying text

in every page of that diary entry. I was petrified of not remembering the searing words

my mother left sizzling in my brain or the abandonment my father stuck echoing in my

chest. I was petrified that I would forget and be vulnerable again. With each scratch of

the pen I etched my past into my permanent memories.

I learned quickly. Pen to paper equals results. If my mind shook with anxiety, I

would scribble nonsense like spitting up Spaghetti-O’s. Then I would pick it apart and

organize the loops of my brain until I learned what they were made of. If I was

bombarded with thirty thousand school assignment and no time to complete them, I

would make a list. I would make a schedule. I would get it done. And the work itself was

made up of words, that magic shape shifting entity. Pen to paper equals soup. Pen to

paper equals time-table. Pen to paper equals grade. Stephanie and writing equals power.

My romance with writing gradually became an addiction. I was caught with

twenty three unfinished word documents confessing my darkest fears and thoughts, with

scraps of poetry all over my room, with ink stains on every purse, and with sentences that

ran on so far for I had no heart to hold them back.

Then I attended AP Lit senior year of high school. A whole city of language

lovers opened their gates. Strunk and White slapped my wrist with a cold wooden ruler

but gave me more control than I had imagined existed. Anne Sexton taught me that the

perfect metaphor can direct the readers biases. I understood that I coul take the reins in

my relationship with language. I know that the more I learn, the better I can describe, the

deeper I can connect and the sooner I can understand my own mind.

So now I hope that you’ll keep me. I hope that for these four years within your

walls you will never turn me away. I hope that you will not judge too quickly or stamp

my head with a permanent label of skill. NYU, I hope you will always remember my

desire and ability grow and give me the guidance to succeed every semester that I return.

Thanks for your time,

Stephanie A Guedalia N# xxxxxxxxxx

Dialing the Asylum

“Are we all brides to be/ Are we all designed to be confined…We've got to break it

before it breaks us”

--“Patriarch On a Vespa” by Metric

I do not know what I want to be. Too many voices crowd my head waving their

opinions like the meaning of life glints out from between their fingers and I cannot

distinguish the diamonds from glass. I have always been confused about what to believe,

about what is true and what is important. This vertigo set in at a young age but there has

always been one thing that was clear. I do not want to end up like my mother.

See, when my mother lived in Israel, she was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a

Rabbi who learned the Jewish oral tradition even though, in her circle, no females were

allowed to. She was the girl who took kickboxing with the boys from youth group,

punched the walls with them until her knuckles bled and went roaming the streets picking

fights for practice.

When my mother lived in Israel, she was the eighteen-year-old girl who scoffed at

marriage, went to the army even though most religious girls refused and made fun of the

pathetic American boy who kept insisting on a date. She was the nineteen-year-old girl

who finally yielded, began the night by insulting his civilian cowardice, and ended the

night love struck by her newfound kindred spirit and soon-to-be pen pall. Six-months

later she was the girl who got married and then she was the pregnant woman who tried to

finish university through her hormones that eventually weighed her down till collapse.

Then she was the twenty-year-old woman with a first-born child who moved to the

United States and became the bitter forty-year-old woman who I came to know.

My mother’s fall from the high horse of independence and idealistic drive became

a thorn in her thoughts affecting her every decision. When I look back at my childhood --

those years of growing and becoming -- the memories drown in cotton candy clouds of

forced happiness and forgetting. My eyes would see one thing, my Mother would tell me

another and I lived surrounded by a thick racket of rage, distortion and self-doubt.

If I wanted a pair of scissors for a homework assignment I would ask my mother,

“Do we have any scissors?”

“Yes they’re in the drawer.”

“But I don’t see them in the drawer.”

“Well that’s where they are.”

“But I don’t see them!”

“Enough Stephanie. They’re in there now Shh!”

Her desire to be a good mother was a selfish one. It was not the desire to raise

happy healthy children and create a loving home. It was the desire to attempt to maintain

the greatness she had been living before her marriage. The pedestal would read “perfect

mother” and any threat to that chiseled engraving, like reality or her children’s

complaints, was marked for destruction.

So the solution in this particular instance was not to go buy new pair of scissors.

That would admit imperfection and undermine her goal, her desire to lie to herself and

everyone around that she was indeed a “perfect mother.” The solution was to end to the

complaints.

“No. There are no scissors in the drawer! And I need them or Mrs. Orosco will be

mad at me!”

Then my mother would remember her logical mind games from the twists of

rabbinical law, “There are scissors in the drawer Stephanie, your eyes must be lying to

you, so you must be crazy. I’m dialing the asylum.”

She would remember her command from her years in the army, “Stephanie, you

may not challenge my authority under this roof! Get out of the house. You can sleep at a

friend’s tonight!”

Or worse, she would remember her physical strength from her years of

kickboxing and one way or another the disruption to her polished view would be taken

care of.

My mother transformed from a strong independent teenage girl, to a woman who

lied to herself and to others, who cared not for real truth but for how she could

manipulate it to suit her interests. I nearly lost my sanity.

But my father would always remind me:

“Stephanie, You know what you know. Don’t let her tell you otherwise.”

***

When my father lived in Israel, he was the American high school who

remembered his broken Hebrew from Israeli kindergarten. He was the eighteen-year-old

boy who sat learning philosophy in the study room of men’s orthodox Jewish seminary.

He was the twenty-year-old college student who loved the music of Sting and the Police

that taught him about Jungian psychology and dream interpretation. The twenty-year-old

who was pressured into a date with an Israeli girl by his mother and fell for their shared

religious ideologies. He was the twenty-one year-old husband who heard her anger and

blamed himself, who became the loving forty year old man that I come to know, who

feared and cared for his children.

When reality became nothing more than moving shapes, pictures and sounds that

I could not trust, he would remember his books and take me seriously, speaking of the

quest for truth that the great philosophers struggled with.

When I was too afraid to sleep he would remember his music and stay up

watching television, teaching me about dream symbolism and Surrealist paintings.

And when the Law and Med-school bound students in my high school made fun

of my artistic inclinations he would assert why they were stupid and why the boys who

broke my heart and used me were ugly and so lucky to ever have had a chance with a girl

like me.

I was the fiery anarchist girl with my mother’s potential and with the relationship

with my father that she wanted. I was my mother’s favorite child to torment.

“I see that smirk!” she would yell at me while tears toppled from the rims of my

cheeks down my face.

The female figure in my life was manipulative and mean. The male figure was

passionate, kind-hearted and trustworthy. When I lived in Newton, Massachusetts, I was

a girl with a serious tomboy complex. I was the girl who would cringe at any accusation

of being “girly”, whose goal was to be considered one of the guys.

Eventually, sitting in the back of my friend’s car, I became the high school senior

who heard the song, “help, I’m alive” on the radio and yelled at the driver to turn it up.

The lyrics rolled out like secret confessions woven into techno-rock beats. “Metric” was

the name of the band. And I ran to the Internet and fumbled through websites to find

Emily Haines, singer and bandleader.

That is when I learned about her.

***

Emily Haines is the thirty-seven year old who speaks in interviews with an

unquestioning confidence and writes lyrics like “watch out/ cupid stuck me with a

sickness/ pull your little arrows out and let me live my life”. A woman can maintain

independence past nineteen.

She is the sincere skeptic who in a "youtube" video maintains that “you can in

live in what you think is reality but it's in fact a fantasy… whether it's rooms full of

shallow people that are your "friends”…or things that we pursue…like fame or

popularity or love.” A woman can seek truth over idealistic fantasies.

And she is the educated, self-reflective woman who told the Montreal Mirror how

she got over a serious tomboy complex.

My early performances … [I] dressed according to indie rock

rules, jeans and a T-shirt, … As a serious musician, I wanted to separate

myself from the pop tarts so I resigned myself to acting like a guy, and I

was unhappy. I was completely limiting myself by thinking that it's

superficial of me to be a girl, to wear a…skirt…. Haven't we already seen

the model of the woman who sets herself free by claiming her own

sexuality? It should be so established, feminist rhetoric is all over the

place, but you act on it and people still don't know what the fuck you're

doing.

I no longer cringe at being called a girl. Like my mother once was, Emily Haines

is strong and self-reliant. Unlike my mother, she values logic, not her own personal

biases, to find truth and make decisions. Like my father, she is knowledgeable, honest,

and deeply in touch with herself.

We are all echoes of our past and I would like to control what kind of echo I

become. So when I think of my model, of who I want to be, I think of my mother and

father and I listen to Metric while clicking my iPhone to see Emily Haines’ face light up

the screen.

Something inside me just died

And I am not sprawled across the floor

I lay in my bed like a shell

Around the pool of blood that is still leaking…

And it rips through my body like a million voices screaming

LET ME LIVE.

And each child that would have been born

And each egg that in my uterus would have bloomed

Waits in my ovaries

In a line to melt and join the red stream shrieking down my pantyhose.

And I trade their lives for mine.

So I may climb the Alpines

And ride bareback through China

So I may afford this life of odd jobs

And taste and break and run

--And it rips through my body like a current quaking blame

But in three days I will wash off this shade of shame

Till a month when I will writhe and rise again.

Rainbow

“For a man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be

lost. . . Not til we are lost . . . do we begin to find ourselves.”—Thoreau, Walden

I found myself sitting like a fully clothed fetus, chest and arms huddling over my

tucked knees. The purple-black sky encompassed this place. It was as if the world was

one large dome of a building, whose walls and ceiling meshed into one swoop of eyes

that glinted at me out of the cool darkness. These eyes stared with such intensity, I almost

believed they could blaze right through my skull and wage war over its’ arrangement.

And I felt that way, sitting there, unsettled by how the campfire could burn my face from

two feet away. I felt like wax melting. The shape of my mind was melting down to be

molded once again. In the Golan Mountains, among strange travelers, free spirits, and

wild children, malleable me was morphing.

Every child is a soft and impressionable mound, yanked and dented with time.

When we reach Adulthood, the clay begins to harden and the shape becomes more

permanent. Last year, I thirsted to find my “self”, by myself, to not simply be the product

of my nurture. It was my gap year in Israel, the stretch of time that lived beyond the years

of high school, college, job, that lived beyond the rigid, structured time. This was time to

search, to try, to play. So when a friend invited me to a hippie gathering in the desert, I

dropped out of my other plans, shirked all responsibilities, dawned the earthiest clothing I

owned and headed to the unknown world of “something new”.

I wanted to finally experience the “real”, the unfiltered.

When I arrived at Rainbow, the sun was out. My friends and I pitched our tent

among some others by the entrance path, and as we walked deeper into the camp, we saw

other tents scattered further than we'd imagined. This place was larger then I’d dreamed.

Canvas peaked out from between the hills, and all along the distant valley that we

had overlooked while walking in. There was one alone under a tree to the right of the

horizon; another one nestled in the cracks of a cliff. I could climb down to camps in the

valley with carefully controlled balance and feet so slanted that I might have been a

ballerina. This was a whole village, a whole world even. I was amazed that once a year so

many people hiked down to this place and made it home. They live out here for months, I

let the fact ring though my head like a dizzying gong that vibrated as my friends

dissolved into the scenery. I too wandered in.

I could feel the breeze stroke my face and feather back my hair as I wobbled

toward the kitchen tent. Gently balancing, foot by foot on the rock-and-twig-covered

earth, I made my way to the black canopy where I was meant to drop off a box of dates. I

had eaten one on the way and hoped that they wouldn’t notice, that they wouldn’t

somehow feel the missing weight when I handed them the box or smell the sweet on my

lips. It wasn’t clear if the laws that governed my world applied here.

“Here, I was told to give this to you,” and I handed the box to a woman who

might have been older than my mother. Her auburn hair matched the dust of the Desert

Mountains and I could have sworn her green eyes were extensions of the grass that

painted the humpy terrain. “Thank you” the woman smiled at up at me with a

characteristically Israeli rasp in her voice. Men and women moved through and around

us, occupied with carrying and shifting crates, pots or other objects that I couldn’t quite

identify. She reached out from her place on the dirt, and nestled the dates in her pool of

packed and unpacked food-gifts. “These are good ones,” she eyed the label and shared an

enjoyment of the surrounding hubbub with her friends, who scattered themselves around

the kitchen tent. I tried to eye nothing but the woman’s face, to not let my eyes stray to

her bare breasts, adorned in mystically blue swirls of paint.

The black canvas stretched out so wide above me that tiny diamonds of the blue

sky pierced through, organized like a thin warped checkerboard. “Where did you get

these from, the truck?” she chuckled, “is he still trying to drive down those boulders? I

guess he thinks lightening the weight will help.” Distracted by preparation, her words

should have been trite but they were spoken as if I was an old friend. That air flowed

through everyone in Rainbow. There was a current that pulsed through us whispering that

we all shared the same secret…because if we didn’t then we wouldn’t have found this

place.

I started to believe it. And maybe it was true.

As people settled in, the place began to swarm with mingling crowds, spread thin

in patches all over the terrain. As with the woman in the kitchen tent, every person I met

addressed me with a familiarity that steadily set in with every encounter. I stood, under

the black canopy again, speaking to a middle-aged man from Maryland. He looked

almost like Uncle Joey from Full House, in a dorky khaki fishing hat. The man gave off a

faint aura of docile trust and benevolence. He seemed happy to meet a person my age.

“How old are you?” he asked “Eighteen, this is my gap year between high school and

college”, and there it was, “Oh that’s great! I’ve met kids like you, but mostly from

England or Australia. It makes so much sense, to take time to travel before you lock

yourself into a path in college. I wish I had done that…” I could see his minds eye

digress, perhaps to his past, but he snapped it back. “How come you thought to do it?”

“Peer pressure really,” I admitted, “most kids in my high school went to Israel before

college… So how did you wind up here?” I asked him.

“Well I lived in Maryland my whole life. I’d never left and I was working there

as an accountant in a boxed off cubicle. I finally said to myself, I am going to get up and

see the world. My friends and family teased that I was all talk. So one day I stopped

talking and I did it. I booked flights, found hostels, quit my job and left. I’ve been

traveling for four years.” I stood astonished, arms dangling as if I had just dropped

something huge. “How do you make a living?” I wondered out loud, “Well I had money

saved up and when I land in a new place, I get a job for a while until it’s time to leave,

then I get on a plane and find a new place.” “Oh.” It suddenly seemed so obvious to me.

“I do something like that too,” a Middle Eastern juggler chimed in from near by.

He was wearing a black and white striped headscarf and Aladdin pants. “I get a job or

juggle on the streets” and he started rattling off places he’d been. I felt like someone

grabbed the cloth of my worldview and tore it open like I was in a roadrunner cartoon.

The whole time there had been infinite opportunities of what my life could be…infinite

desires to choose from, to try to link or stabilize. I felt my feet rise above the ground and

float. I could literally be anything. I was no longer mentally enslaved by the doctrine of

my upbringing. I was lost.

“That’s incredible.” I told the Maryland man. “Well”, he began, “Sometimes I

wonder when I will settle down, meet someone, start a family. I’ve talked to people about

it ‘round here. But they remind me: How was I bothered when I wasn’t traveling? Every

day. How often am I bothered by that thought now? Maybe once a week… So it’s an

improvement.”

The clusters of people waved and flowed like meshing tides of calm water,

naturally shifting. People left and joined a group with no surprise or notice. Pink began to

grow and spread in the darkening sky and someone new was standing beside the

Maryland man. “Where’d you learn to do that?” he spoke with an accented lisp.

“Around,” the juggler smirked back. The man watched the pins spin and twist in the air.

He was plump, like a sitting cartoon cat and there was a coercion going on inside my

mind he really was one. “How old are you?” he asked, “I’m eighteen.” “Really?” he was

shocked. “I guess I thought you were older because you are traveling by yourself.” I was

beginning to forget that I had come with friends, that I was not, in fact, alone. “How old

is she?” a woman wrapped her arms around the cat-man. “Oooo, you’re warm,” he

hummed, “she’s eighteen.” “You could be my daughter…” she spoke her words like,

bitter honey, they seemed to come out smooth and tart. “I guess,” I shrugged, “No, really,

you could be my daughter. I was pregnant eighteen years ago.” “What happened?” and

my brows scrunched with concern. “I got an abortion…it still hurts sometimes…”

Heartbreaking pain washed through me.

As the stars came out and I sat by the fire, I entered a conversation with a white-

haired British photographer. His name was Joth Shakerley and he didn’t understand why

I was going to a Liberal Studies college come fall. “If you love theater and film, if you

love writing music, then that’s what you need to pursue. Going to this college seems like

a peer-pressure thing. I never went to college, instead I picked up a camera and now I

take photographs for wealthy weddings, but mostly I’m a Rainbow follower and take

pictures here.” He propped up is camera. I couldn’t justify my choice.

There was a secret we all knew once we were there, and it followed each of us

once we left. The secret that this life is a choice we all could make. The rhythm of drums,

the whistle of foreign instruments, the comfort of familiar strangers, the travel, the

simplicity, the escape, it could be our lives if we embraced it. If we walked that windy

road through the dark forests or climbed down the rocks and bent under water and

branches, if we followed the chirpings, hummings, the call.

The life of standardized schools, offices and houses, the life of family dinners,

coffee dates, ties and heals, it is not the only reality. It is one built upon the earth,

contrived and added on to the un-hindered world of movement, the world of voices and

the soft warm flow of the unconfined. We could drop out of the structured at any minute

if we chose. The choice to live among metal and concrete is a choice as great as one to

never leave the mountains, or to return. I must justify any decision I make, and there are

days I think back and long for the free lives of these people, who wander only by their

own wills. But then I remember the lonely glint in every eye.

Flesh and Bone

There is something seductive about the color of blood, how solid and real crimson

is. Like the color is saying This is it. I am yours.

I remember the flesh of my body standing by that living room wall. My mother’s

shadow dancing on the lead paint that I hovered an inch away from, her shadow dancing

as she thrashed forward against the Oakwood furniture, feet pushing off of the ugly tan

carpet on her way toward me. “Don’t touch, my stuff”, I could hear her saying. “Don’t

touch, my stuff”, always with that rhythm.

Her mouth was so controlled. It was as if she didn’t have lips at all, as if her front

teeth were the only bones in her oral cavity and her mouth’s opening tightened like the

hole of a drawstring purse. Her words came out of that narrow exit in formulaic, concise

commands. “Don’t touch, my stuff.”

The volume in my childhood home made it seem as if there was no noise at

all…just an echoing. Like there was always water clogging my ears. “Don’t touch, my

stuff”, the murmur, as if my body was under water. As if I was in the YMCA pool

floating like a corpse under ounces of chlorine and my mother was yelling, “Don’t touch,

my stuff” from the lifeguard’s post.

I remember my body standing against that wall, my eyes like glass, with her

shadow dancing behind me. It’s funny. My eyes were glass, seeing nothing and my mind

was saw a montage of bruise colored memories; my elementary school hands reaching

for a pencil that sat on the way back of in my mother’s study desk. I nearly had my knees

up on the ledge before there was a harsh twist of my wrist, and purple-blue exploded

under my skin.

Or the night before my SATs when I needed any form of ID so I could get in the testing

room. I remember rummaging through my mother’s desk drawers, a shove, and my back

hitting that oak wood bookcase, the red on my spine and knees. I remember the cold way

she hit, like I deserved it. And I knew from the movies that I didn’t but somehow, inside,

I knew I did.

I knew what was coming for me every time I entered my mother’s study, that

room, her palace. I shouldn’t have been in there. I can rattle off excuses, saying that I

needed a pencil or an ID. But knowing those consequences as well as I knew that

nighttime would fall, my body waltzed in like a self-proclaimed victim.

I can’t explain it, but my body, my skin, my flesh…it doesn’t belong to me. When

it moves, it moves. When it hurts, it hurts. I can’t tell this body what to do or feel and

there I was, flesh standing an inch away from that lead paint wall knowing what was

coming, while my eyes got lost in those bruise colored memories.

There’s something so beautiful about the color of blood. Crimson, so dark and

sturdy and real. I remember the first day my brain noticed that fact, like there was a

switch in the back of my head, a piece of lead that got flipped. That was the day I started

to crave.

The color is so real. Real like cracked bones are real. Real like the black that splits

open the white when you step on a bone as you walk through a graveyard dream.

And there’s something so severe and empowering about taking a blade in your hand,

flickering with that silver light, and changing the face of your skin; taking the plain white

surface and slicing a line right through it, slicing a mark that only you will see. Like the

color is saying This is it. I am yours. I am your own.

And the feeling is a spark too, quick sharp, like when something’s too sweet, or

when you chew on your pen and you feel the scratch on the roof of your mouth. You

can’t stop because the more you scratch the more numb you get and the harder you must

scrape to feel that feeling again.

That’s all I could think about only moments before my mother burst in. Before

she burst in with those thunder thighs and rock-hard arms. That was all. I was lost in

thought, standing by that wall, owning nothing but the patches of my skin that my mother

never saw, the clawed up sides of my hip, the X marks that danced around my rib cage.

There I was, letter opener in hand, in her study, carving my secret will into the side of my

fleshy hip when she burst in the room. And there I was, flesh of my body standing by that

living room wall with her legs thrashing toward me, with her eyes seeing coolly like

black devils. “Don’t touch my stuff”, her draw string lips, withered as raisins, soft as

cement, darting toward me. She eyed my fingers holding her device like the ultimate

betrayal, shocked and appalled that these hands would ever have the audacity to hold

what was hers. That’s when she grabbed my wrist. I watched and thought about the

different sounds bones make when they crack. She grabbed my writs and the thuds hurt

more that day. I owned nothing. The vacancy and silence filled my stomach like a

nauseous storm. I own nothing. The thrashing was my body now and the pain wasn’t

mine. I own nothing.

Whenever she sees me now she eyes my hip. I am a naked.

I can’t explain it, but my body, my skin, my flesh…it’s not my own.

I Made a List

of the inhabitants

in the pool of my thoughts

who range from heart failure and war

to color of my nails.

they wade and glide and intertwine,

tangle in each other’s mess,

watches catch and violently yank wet hair

thin threads of laced swimsuits snag on toes or fingers

This is why they drown.

And I, the only lifeguard on duty,

sit with my magazines and fishing rod

trying to pull them apart and empty the waters for the next slew of guests

who,

hopefully,

will be a bit more civilized

and calmly thread themselves above and below

the surfaces of the pool

with elegance

so I can sit and glaze through the cheap literature,

and squished faces who gaze vacantly out the pages of this month’s Seventeen.