I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

by Marisa Crane

It has always been this way, my anger and sadness twin forces inside of me.

You aren’t waiting for us when we get home. You aren’t lying in bed reading. You aren’t cooing in Mischief’s fluffy face. You aren’t sifting through the mail, perusing the circulars for sales. You aren’t, against your better judgment, making an afternoon coffee. Suddenly, all this unoccupied space. I want to get blackout drunk for months on end. Yes, that’s what I want. I want to sit in my own filth and like it.

I want to be someone who moves people, even tiny, helpless people. Now, where is that switch, the one that turns off such a humiliating desire?

What I mean is, it never once occurred to me that you, too, were mortal.

how can I manage to keep on living in a world without you, a world that hates both me and my family?

As I got older and gayer, I heard a lot of talk about chosen family, but I didn’t understand why something so beautiful had to be compared to family. Why couldn’t it just be its own good thing?

But I don’t want to be strong, I want to be a time-traveler.

Maybe we wanted another person to join us while we watched the world burn.

We is the longest word I know.

It’s true: if given the chance, I would trade her for you.

it. The wine labels remind me of you, how people were intimidated by you and your matter-of-factness until they took a step back and studied you from a new angle, understanding that you were both hard and soft, loveable and disagreeable. Some people took one or two hangouts, some never learned. I’ve known them for five years, you used to say. At this point, it’s no longer my problem.

Q: What do you know about distance? A: I know that I feel it everywhere.

I remember feeling a little insulted that you thought I would use something as impersonal as poison.

If I had to choose, I would say the moment between when you decided to kiss me and when we actually kissed, that is where I wish to live forever. Inside my anticipation, dying to receive you.

My brain was never much help: Divorce is expensive—she’d probably prefer to fake her own death.

Things didn’t work out with her for the same reason things never do: she felt like a distraction from my life, instead of a part of it.

Your history scattered everywhere: books piled against the wall in the bedroom, countless near-empty lotion bottles on the dresser, fertility paperwork, ultrasounds, essays and quizzes you were in the middle of grading, will forever be in the middle of grading.

But it turns out, human beings can grow used to just about anything if given the opportunity, and lucky us, we were given the opportunity to grow used to the blinking cameras in every room, to let it all hang loose in the bathroom, to make sex tapes we’d never get to see.

The first stage of grief, I realize, isn’t denial—it’s clinging.

We held each other’s hands tightly. The same hands we sometimes dropped in public when we felt unsafe—we had that privilege unlike so many others; whiteness meant we could remove our otherness like a sweater if we wanted. We could walk five feet apart and temporarily become gal pals.

Q: How do you define freedom without ever having felt fully free? A. N/A B. N/A C. N/A D. N/A

They were the same people who thought that everyone’s horrific circumstances were a direct result of their behaviors, that you could manifest a better life, if only you’d try harder, you lazy piece of shit.

Pop Quiz: Q: What is worth more: a human life or physical property? A: Say what you really mean. Q: I’m the one who demands things around here. A: Which human life?

The troubled kids, they knew what was up well before I did. They knew that evidence-based was nothing more than a formal way of saying, Despite not knowing you, we will fix you.

Instead, you said, I hope our kid wants to be our friend. It would have been the saddest thing in the world if it were coming out of someone else’s mouth. Out of yours, it sounded like an incantation.

It took pushing through the affair and coming out on the other side to realize just how unimportant we were. We weren’t curing a rare blood disease, we were listening to our hormones. No one had ever followed us. And our partners were better off without us. They found new people to love and be loved by.

Give me one of my own, you said. I never dared tell you this, but you saying the words my own hurt me in all the hard-to-reach places.

And here I was thinking my tears might move her enough to forgive me for not turning my body into a home.

I don’t see her again because she made a good point, and I wasn’t there for the good points.

a tiny someone is predisposed to trust you and you have the chance to prove them right.

We are putting on an incredible performance of survival. Where is our prize?

Q: What is the difference between nice and kind? A: Only one is a result of fear.

Q: Which is more important: the object or the light that illuminates the object? A: I know that I’ve spent my entire life convinced I wasn’t real unless I was loving someone with everything I had.

I worry I will lose it all at any moment, but I keep my exoskeletons to myself.

“Funny—it’s shade when you need to escape the sun, like under a tree. But a shadow when they hate us,” she says.

What I’m trying to say is—I’ve never been afraid of anything more than I’ve been afraid of my own happiness. But I want it, oh I want it. Something tells me it isn’t happiness without fear. This small fact keeps me breathing and sleeping.

She is what one might call well-adjusted—I wonder what that is like.

“Beau. I dated Beau,” she says, searching for my eyes. “Dark and stormy, that was me.”

“If you can’t resurrect them, you might as well date their favorite ex.”

Maybe it was selfish, but we wanted two mothers to be enough.

. . . Sometimes, parents & children become the most common strangers. Eventually, a street appears where they can meet again. CHEN CHEN