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I didn’t know not being enough, or being so wrong about someone, would feel this way.
Nobody would advise you seeing me. You are capable of a finality I can’t exact.
dichotomies
I think self-esteem is a white invention to further separate one person from another. It asks people to assess their values and implies people have worth. It seems like identity capitalism.
She believed in subversion and turning things upside down. She mocked everything. My desire to be normal or sincere made her laugh.
“Men will never love you,” she said once. “They’ll use you up, and, when you’re bone dry and it’s your time to write, you’ll be alone without a goddamn typewriter to your name.”
cynicism
The strange thing about poverty is that maintaining a level of desperation and lack of integrity keeps the checks rolling in.
My mother’s spirit loomed over us, imploring us to avenge her death, but there were too many culprits: from the government, to the reservation, to her own family, to whoever hurt her the very first time.
You seemed engaged by my dysfunction because you are a writer and not because I had experienced it.
We should have wanted for simpler things, but in many ways my mother taught me love was divine—like a hermitage or vision or picking from the tree of knowledge.
benevolence,
It could be like Eve. The old texts say we get menses for the fall, feel pain for the fall. God couldn’t watch it; he sent us his boy, but I doubt he watched his son die. I think he just waited for him on the other side.
Men were born to hurt my mother in the flesh and the text, and she was my savior.
Her family lives away from her, and when her husband died, she wanted to die. She seemed certain that it was her time. Sometimes suicidality doesn’t seem dark; it seems fair.
Liberace’s,
While I’m walking along dull-blue lines or gluing Popsicle sticks, you are with a white woman named Laura. She plays tennis. She’s an ethereal white woman who thinks dogs are people too. You think, Isn’t this nice. You’re tempted to mention the sad woman in the hospital, your ex. It might assuage your guilt or get you laid, and it might kill me to imagine this here.
When you told me that I want too much, I considered how much you take.
Even if I never ate again, I could not present myself so meekly:
I tried to cry into a wall as silently as I could. I tried to call my friend to get me from your house. It would be dangerous to forgive you for that kind of abandonment. I think it’s dangerous to let go of a transgression when the transgressor is not contrite. I think of myself in black lingerie, crying against your adobe wall.
I went to your bar, and my friends let me have my grief, in long drives, close to your home, while they explained that love is like this. They read endless letters of mine and told me that it was all enough. I was enough and sometimes people break up. I felt juvenile. A friend is in love with me, and when the town lit the luminaries outside of your bar on a December night, I told him that I was not finished loving you.
infinitesimal.
“I think this up and down . . . and it’s not the first time I’ve centered myself in the love of a man . . . My son doesn’t need to witness this. I should have been spared from the life my mother gave to me.”
I don’t think that I am lonely. I think that I am starved and maybe ravenous for the very thing you withhold from me.
amorous
histrionic,
hindrance,
She likes to drink, and she doesn’t know why I can’t just find another man. “I guess it is that easy,” I say. “If I wasn’t sentimental.”
I am unraveling in the dark kitchen. I am scattering my wet eyes looking for signs or something significant. I am incorrigible when I’m like this. I wish I could do anything but stand alone in a dark kitchen without you.
I might be gone, but you can still see me with a black light in your mattress. There is permanence in physical craft.
My body left resonance that can’t be dismantled or erased. I don’t know if men think about what seduction is. It was reading the work you love, and buying clothes, and making polite conversation with your friends—convincing your mother that I could mother you like she does. It was laying warm towels across my legs before I shaved so that when you touched me, I was soft. It was withholding from you at the right times, and listening to you with my eyes and ears. I worked hard to assert intent on your bed and your body. I’ve soiled all beds for you with my wanting and preparation. I prepared
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When you loved me it was degrading. Using me for love degraded me worse.
The distinctness of my bed and its corners are fucked by my fucking you. My agency is degraded. For comfort, I remember my hospital bed and the neutrality of the room I had.
How could someone like you ever be on the other side of the door—on the other side of this?
Salish
I bought a tripod to take pictures of my body and my loneliness.
He was enamored with the convenience—we were both ill and alone and intelligent.
He was unafraid of me, in the daylight, at any time—I felt enough.
You were so different from the men who have cowered from me. You were different from the men who made a challenge out of hurting me.
I talked about you, and he said that I wouldn’t ever be sane enough. He said that there was nothing I could do to convince you that I was not crazy, and why would I want to?
I defended you. I knew that you did love me and telling me about other women was hurtful, but I stayed with you those nights on my own regard. If you were hurting me, I knew it was not intentional.
Romantics can be comforting.
You are such a home to me.
When you were annoyed with me, I had to prove I was sane. I didn’t speak my mind like I used to.
In my kitchen I turn the lights off again, like I used to. It allows me to feel as nothing as the dark.
I was polite enough, and considerate enough, to hurt myself like a secret. So you didn’t need to question how this kind of crazy would hinder your work or your isolation.
I knew that, whichever white woman you saw while I was in the hospital, she would have let you have friends. She would have trusted that growth hurt but that it redefined the boundaries of the relationship—those boundaries were mutually developed in her mind. She would have convinced herself that permissiveness equated to a voice—like you wouldn’t have fucking done what you do anyway, regardless of her consent or mine.
Someone said I held some power in my secret knowledge. I told her it felt like the opposite.
We found solace in getting drunk together. At your bar, I told you that I wanted to be chosen. You explained that you were sorry. You told me that you chose me.
For you, and our child, and my sons, I said what happened up and down on the page. Because, if my sons want to see how terrible our love was, and why we chose it, they can see us closest here.
