You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry)

by Andrea Gibson

Of course beauty hunted me. It hunts everyone. But I outran it, hid in worry, regret, the promise of an afterlife or a week’s end.

One night in Ann Arbor, my friend, still undiagnosed, could not uncurl her fingers to strum her guitar, so she sang the chords instead. It was the first time in my life I’d seen pain become an instrument: 10 dozen goosebumps

There is no escaping the magic now. Beauty caught me and never let me go. And the thing about the world record is—if someone breaks it after me, and they will break it after me, I will love that so much that without even trying, I’ll break it again.

I know most people try hard to do good and find out too late they should have tried softer. I’ve never in my whole life been levelheaded, but the older I get, I’m more level-hearted— and I think we make gods who look like us for a reason. I think, in spite of it all, we trust we can be believed in. When I don’t believe in myself, I try to remember I have walked on water, like, seven-hundred times in Maine in the dead of winter.

because where I come from beauty is in the eye of anyone who sees what’s missing but can’t stop pointing to what’s still there. If there’s no definition for love yet— I think that’s a good one.

You’ve walked on water so many times you know grace is super, super slippery. There’s literally nothing anyone is more likely to fall from. Some sound advice I give myself, like, twice an hour: Wear knee pads on the way to your ego, Andrea. Being right is boring. It comforts only the tiniest parts of us, and when it comes to hearts, I want to always be a size queen ’cause that’s how I found you— lifting the spirits of everyone around like a hot air balloon just from the way you burned to be a better person today than you were the day before. Burning to be better is my favorite quality on anyone, and you are on fire like a gay men’s choir rocking the halftime show of a football game. I’ve been dancing in the end zone since you taught me to start breaking every promise I have made to my pain, taught me my wounds will never be bigger than I am.

love you because you’ve never had a mirror face. Because the truth is the last thing you would ever try to fake. So sometimes you look like a human scribble, like a two-year-old has colored you in, like you have too many feelings to stay inside the lines of your own skin.

But we learned how wrong we were, and weren’t those the best days? The days we learned how wrong we were and so got to grow into our goodness, throwing the peach pits of our old selves into the garden to grow sweetness.

And in the Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia, there are three juggling balls sewn by hand, by my hands, from material cut from my socks, you say, though I am certain it was my underwear. Either way, the juggling balls were made from what I wore underneath what everyone could see and sewn with precision the way my grandma taught me before dying of a broken heart and leaving me a collection of thimbles so I could be someone strong enough to keep things from falling apart.

Like the dawn of a simple day was everything you’d ever put on your Christmas list. I’d still be sleeping when you’d leave for circus practice. Circus practice, where you’d walk the tightrope, twirl on trapeze bars, then come home and pull me into the front yard to teach me how to toss juggling balls into a still-blushing sky. When I think about why we broke up, why you flew all the way to Croatia to let go of the juggling balls I made you, I know it’s because I was a terrible juggler. I couldn’t figure out how to hold something and set it free at the same time. So I dropped the ball. Convinced myself I was up in the air about you when really I was up in the air about me.

It’s what we do—turn our bodies into museums of what was broken.

Blame the checkbook, the affair, the bottled up tears. Blame the toast going stale the day after the wedding. We rip the letter off the keyboard instead of control, command, escape, delete. Say it was the turbulence of long distance instead of the baggage unclaimed. But at the carousel of clarity (otherwise known as fifteen years of therapy), I see I wasn’t running from the war back then. I was running from the peace. The love I did not believe I was worth. And because that lie held so much grief, I don’t know that I ever got over you as much as I got under the engine of myself to fix the machine of my love, which now runs okay but still runs ...

My friend wakes up at noon. Goes to bed at eight. Wants less time because she wants less pain. I understand. I’ve been there too. I can spot a scar beneath a wristwatch from a hundred yards away. And no, it is not the weak who try to clock out early. It’s people who are desperate to go home.

To make up for lost time, you need only to put down the grudge you are holding so you can pick up the phone and say, How many days did we need each other at the same time without knowing it? Bitterness is the easiest way to leave this world having had only a near-life experience.

To truly live is to see right through the skin to the avalanche. If we never deny the inevitable end of the story, we will write it more beautiful while we’re alive.

QUEER YOUTH ARE FIVE TIMES MORE LIKELY TO DIE BY SUICIDE means: You lived five times harder than you should have had to to still have a body when you graduated high school. means: Hate worked five times harder to make your spirit its wishbone. means: When your mother asked what was wrong, you were five times more likely to believe you’d lose her if you spoke the truth.

Silence rides shotgun wherever hate goes.

In this position I’ve grown continuously, like bacteria in a staph infetion. I had no idea that holding myself back would be contagious. I would like to have a different kind of impact on the future company I keep.

The psychology manuals say no one really wants to die. They want relief. They believe they will never find it in this world. That belief could be right. Or wrong. One would have to stay to find out. Friend, if you stay, at least we will be together, and I have an extra straw. I could show you where the lakes on this planet are buried. How you do not need light-years to reach them. The dark years work too. Sometimes better. Sometimes grief is the fastest route to truth.

If your wounds are still open, trust they are doors to an answer, and walk through. What if we don’t have to be healed to be whole? There are holes in every inch of the fabric that makes me who I am, but pull the string on my back and I’ll say I LOVE YOU and mean it whenever you want. Come flood my home with your eyes. I read that people scream when they are in pain because screaming actually lessens the pain— anyone who asks you to hold your tongue is asking you to hold the heaviest thing in the galaxy. Forget them and remember you can tell me anything about how hard it is to stop flirting with your expiration date.

Joy is just easier to carry than sorrow, and you could lift a city from how long you’ve spent holding what’s been nearly impossible to hold. This world needs those who know how to do that. Those who can find a tunnel with no light at the end of it and hold it up like a telescope to show that the darkness contains many truths that can bring the light to its knees.

It had been two decades since she came out. Two decades since her heart was something they had sincerely asked about.

If you are going to be anything in the world tonight, you better be lightning. You better find something in you honest enough to strike them.

For seventy-five minutes I spoke about nothing but love. How everything but I love you is small talk. How their daughter was the only person in the world sweet enough to always call me honey. How the first time we shared a bed she laid down with her arms tight at her side like a mummy, so terrified she was to love something and lose it again.

Sundays I went to church but struggled to call it prayer if it didn’t leave grass stains on my knees. Couldn’t call it truth if it didn’t come with a dare to crawl into the cave by the creek and stay there until somebody counted all the way to one hundred.

Why are the keys to our future in the hands of those who have the longest commutes from their heads to their hearts? Whose greed is the smog that keeps us from seeing our own nature and the sweetness we are here to protect? Do you know sometimes when gathering nectar, bees fall asleep in flowers? Do you know fish are so sensitive snowflakes sound like fireworks when they land on the water? Do you know sea otters hold hands when they sleep so they don’t drift apart? Do you know whales will follow their injured friends to shore, often taking their own lives so as not to let a loved one be alone when he dies? None of that is poetry. It is just the earth being who she is in spite of us stamping barcodes on the sea. In spite of us acting like Edison invented daylight.

Who, more than the earth, has bled for us? How do we not mold our hearts after the first spruce tree who raised her hand and begged to be cut into piano keys so the elephants could keep their tusks?

Is the volcano that pours the mercury into the thermometers held under our tongues. The earth takes our temperature, tells us when we are too hot, even after we’ve spent decades denying her fever. Our hands held to her burning forehead, we insist she is fine while wildfires turn redwoods to toothpicks, readying the teeth of our apocalypse. She sends smoke signals all the way from California to New York City— ash falls from the sky. Do you know the mountains of California used to look like they’d been set on fire because they were so covered in monarch butterflies? Do you know monarch butterflies migrate three thousand miles using only the fuel they stored as caterpillars in the cocoon? We need so much less than we take. We owe so much more than we give.

If we aimed to be just half as good as one of the earth’s mistakes, we could turn so much around. Our living would be seed, the future would have roots. We would cast nothing from the garden of itself. And we would make the thorns proud.

The thing about loving a stranger is you can guess, but can never be sure, what they are privately surviving on their journey to help others survive.

I wasn’t always the pansy I am now. I used to have a perm, and no one on Earth is tougher than a butch with a perm— especially when wearing a backward baseball cap, mascara, and a muscle shirt—wallet chain bouncing off my quadricep. Military boots and a look in my eye that said, Give me a white flag and I’ll use it for nothing but checking my oil and wiping my sweat. I drove a Z24 Chevy. The muffler built to sound like a motorcycle with a smoker’s cough. I cried only in private and spent not a single second alone. My best friends were barstools and jocks. My shoulder blades sharp as my tongue, which was in a perpetual state of fuck off— but the day I got my first buzz cut, something or everything changed. I looked in the mirror and my tough relaxed. My body so at ease my eyes could no longer hold the flood back.

I cut my hair and grew out my feelings instead. If someday I have a mustache, I know I’ll be comfortable wearing a dress. And if I ever have a beard, I’m certain I’ll be the prettiest girl I’ve ever been.

None of these girls are shocked by the hurt that hunts them— they expect the blade of this life to keep cutting and ask it to whittle them into someone too sharp to touch.

I’ve had many jobs before this one and will have many after, but this is where I learn one of the most vital lessons: if your own story is one you aren’t sure you can survive, remove whatever sharpness you can from another person’s life.

I got sick in 2003, and as much as I tried, illness was a relationship I could never manage to leave. In spite of seeing every doctor in Colorado, I could not divorce my body from its pain. In 2010, I woke up in a scream that lasted eight months. A Charley horse bucking through my blood. I didn’t believe I could live through it for half an hour, then half a year passed and it was still nowhere close to tamed.

Call it jealousy, but couldn’t it also be called faith? To believe there is always something better than you out there?

There was never not a bridge from your chest to mine. My heartbeat was always the sound of your feet walking toward me. I can’t believe how many years I lived without knowing the air you were breathing out was the air I was breathing in. Forgive me for not saying thank you before our lungs had reason to hide.

Trauma is a pretty word for how to die every day of the year, but my voice is alive and right now it is the only justice system I trust to ensure men like you understand the law of gravity, understand you will always be held down by what you held down. There is no such thing as rising from someone else’s ashes. No man’s spirit escapes the hell he denies putting a child through, which is to say, I am the only one out of the two of us who survived you, and I survived you so beautifully.

Can you see it? I know you can. Everyone can see who they were supposed to be. It’s the readiest grief in the world.

I’m twenty years old and don’t know who I am going to lose because of the ways I’m going to stay the same, then later because of the ways I’m going to change too much. I mean, my god is gonna change. My pronouns are gonna change. My body is gonna change not because of my DNA but because a tick is gonna bite me and that little monster is gonna mess with my life more than a parade of homophobes could ever dream of, but love will still throw me over her shoulder and carry me up every story I’ve ever told myself so I can see what’s true,

What I’ve lost in health I’ve gained in access to my own empathy. So when I wish to not be sick, I’m not absolutely certain I’d be happier if that wish came true, and the same goes for what muzzled me, what held me down and shut me up, what locked my voice box is also what taught me how to carve keys from poetry, and now my words are so good at coming to my own rescue, fire trucks pull over to let my voice through. Hold my tongue and I promise my teeth will find a way to tell you, If I’d been born without lifelines, I would have written them myself, ’cause I am writing this at the exact age my mother was when she first got symptoms, and just like everyone else I have no clue what tomorrow will sing, or scream, what I will feel or what I won’t.

And what you do is you live until you die. And you refuse to let the hands of your clock curl into fists to fight the lessons off. Even if the lessons are brutally hard. In all my softest dreams my mother can still walk. And I am pedaling my bicycle beside her.

Because your leaders move their fingers over the buttons of bombs as if they are piano keys. As if they could make a symphony of playing chords around your children’s necks. Because if the heart of the earth is in Arizona, the Grand Canyon is proof of how badly it is breaking. Because we want to pace your border towns and teach families the physics of walking through walls. Because we don’t understand why you believe hell is beneath you. Also—because we want to hear old men play Vivaldi in subway stations in Queens. Because we want to watch skateboarders in Berlin carve the streets into statues of themselves. Because we know kids in New Orleans glue bottle caps to the soles of their shoes and tap dance in Jackson Square. Because we’ve never seen anything like that anywhere.

How did you come to believe that hating yourself would protect you from other people’s hate? What do you mean when you say your hearts melt? Are they like glaciers? Can one person die and drown the whole world? Is that what Jesus did when he meant to do the opposite?

since the day your love’s shoulder turned cold. You were standing in the kitchen the first time you noticed the temperature dropping. A storm front rolled across her face. Ice forming in her once-warm tone. You had no idea what was happening. It was a season you had never seen. Everything before then—summer. Years of her grabbing your hand and pulling you toward a teal August sea. Looking back, you think if you’d had just one week of autumn, if you’d seen even a single leaf turn from green to red, you might have been prepared. Might have even thought it natural. Everything you know about climate change insists the sudden shifts are what’s most dangerous. It was eighty degrees one day and below freezing the next.

Where will you go? a friend on the phone asks. Somewhere warm, you say, and if it were years earlier, you know that somewhere would be a someone. But you’re done making vacations out of people. You want a permanent home.

But visibility is drastically reduced in a storm, and it has not stopped snowing, so staying may no longer be an option. But before you go, remember the weather almost never shifts this suddenly by itself. You’ve scoured the soil for her carbon footprint a thousand times, but have you scoured it for yours? Not to go looking for shame but to know your own impact. And can you do that without deciding you are a poison in the air? Before you leave, put those questions on the map. Love yourself enough to go there.

I don’t aim to be a person of note. I aim to be a person of whole journals filled with stories about hitchhiking the Atlantic coast. Being born took courage, sir. I’m not gonna waste the daylight trying to darken seven-hundred tiny circles on a test just right. How on earth is that anything close to an answer?

You got something sweeter than the honey I shimmied from the hive myself? You got a plan for my life richer than the one where I pick a lucky penny up and ask some song of a woman to marry me for my money?

I changed my mind more often than I changed my socks, and whenever I was criticized for mismatched thoughts, I’d say, Who wants to be today who they were yesterday? Becoming was how I prayed.