I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

Each try takes me further from whatever it is I’m after.

books heal people all the time, just not usually the people who write them.

Your baby is developing methods of self-defeat this week, among them boredom, urgency, and nostalgia. It may even be besieged by ennui!

Didn’t we do everything right and in the right order? And yet, can either of us say we are thriving?

The truth is I cannot play nice and don’t want to, but want to want to, some days.

I told my mother that all I wanted was for us to be normal, a normal family. She said, Oh honey, there’s no such thing.

At some point she stopped taking pictures. I know she did not always love being a mother. She loved her garden and smoking and work.

That’s not how it works, she said. You can’t get addicted to anything that’s good for you.

Another way is, She needed help and no one gave it to her. Another way is, She had her mother’s pain swimming in her blood and her mother’s and her mother’s and her mother’s and she was fat with it.

I told Ty it seemed to me that Boulder had nearly ruined him. “She’s right,” said Rust, finally interested enough to remove his headset. “If you had lived in Boulder for one more week I wouldn’t have wanted to be your friend anymore.”

He cried (!!!) and told me he had loved me, but was afraid. I saw that he was more right than he knew—he was afraid way, way down. And I saw that I’m not afraid. At least not in that deep down way.

She says, I think the universe is tired of waiting for you to get the message.

“You’re not a fraud,” said Ivy supportively. “Just a slacker.”

But if anyone’s haunted, it’s you.”

Couldn’t we be decent and loyal and at the same time completely free?

It’s only been five years and I’ve become completely insufferable.” Ty took a toke. “And you said nothing ever got done in academia.”

Mostly I was a frame or two outside my body,

I drank. I smoked. I spectated. I sculpted reality as I moved through it. The only people I liked were the ones who gave me something for the page, yet I never wrote.

She was a new person now, which so many American women aspired to be—remade! She herself had often wished it. But now that she had been made anew she found it frightening.

My problem is I can’t figure out how sorry to be for the way I’ve been. I’m either a little sorry, very sorry, or not at all sorry.

My problem is I don’t miss you.

In two years he’ll be in Malibu. But for now he is in the past tense.

In Reno there was no emotional last call. A person could completely avoid the black wave at bedtime. Just stay up until you collapse. I missed that. I missed how you were always wanted here, how you never missed anything, how the party didn’t start until you got here.

And then what, I wonder, once their minds were blown? Make all the love you can in all the ways you can and then what? Make art, maybe? I’d like to put it that way.

A slut with a decision-making complex,

I know I am sick in the mind to feel this for all these years no matter what he does. I don’t know how to cure myself.

Anyway, I didn’t like sweet boys. I liked filthy weirdos who scared me a little and I still do.

I spent the morning looking for you on Myspace and trying to untangle a mess of sad white cords made by slaves,

He just sticks in my head.

Shit! It’s terribly depressing to go for years thinking you can do it if you try and then you try and find out maybe you can’t.

Love in text message was sapphic, if Sappho’s fragments had been designed to be addictive.

Was it love, I sometimes wondered, or just the chemical manipulations of unethical design?

but I’m sick of getting a bit of love dangled before my eyes like a tidbit before a dog.

I wish I liked somebody. Even if they didn’t like me it would be better than not feeling anything.

I can’t stop thinking about him. I think I’m mentally ill. Love is a fucking hassle.

Here I am with another heartsick lover beside a stinking, almost-gone pond.

I like it in Sparks, sad and drunk before noon in a Mexican restaurant on a rainy day.

The teeth inside me pulse with longing and lostness.

“Yep, well.” Dottie shrugged. “It’s a messy business being alive.”

“I hurt too much,” I said. “Eh?” “SHE HURTS TOO MUCH!”

I said, “We should probably kiss.” “I can’t,” she said. “I just couldn’t.” Then we did.

“You’re not a dirtbag,” he said. “Loving people is never a wrong thing.”

I make stuff with the rocks I find, nameless things meant only for me.