I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

by Marisa Crane

We argued so often we thought we’d made a mistake marrying for love when there were things like fear and loneliness to bind you.

It feels nice to feel sorry for people who are far better off than me.

In middle school, my only queer friend taught me to use the word family when identifying a queer stranger in public. 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?

At night, while you were with your girlfriend, you would text me that you were sending work emails. This meant that I should be expecting one from you. I and love and you, said the emails. When we got married, you sat on the couch and sent actual work emails while I refreshed my inbox next to you, waiting for the past to meet up with the present. I didn’t know what to do with all that misplaced

I hadn’t understood the tenderness of climbing into bed with you after a stretched-thin day. Of pulling the comforter down and sliding in beside you. Of falling into a dream before we could properly kiss goodnight, but knowing the kiss was still there, hovering between us.

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.

When I was young, the other kids used to call me creepy. They couldn’t provide me with details. It’s just you, they said, avoiding my eyes. This secretly delighted me, until I learned that creepy really meant sensitive, which, of course, is far worse.

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

It seems I’ve lost all my friends. Not in a violent way, but in a burning-out way. They have their own lives to attend to.

And to think, we thought the prison system was corrupt, but the reality is, it was just preparation for what came next.

The kid’s first word is wow, which is really quite something when you think about how little there is to be astounded by.

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

We is the most tender word I know.

In this world, you learn to hold the good days and bad days together in your lungs, and you don’t dare breathe out, for fear that in releasing the bad days, you’ll also lose the good ones. On the walk home, I think, this has been a good day.

“Remembering is a courageous act.”

Of course, countless people lacked access to these things long before the shadow policy went into effect—the law just guaranteed it.

I’ve heard it said that love is choosing to listen to how someone’s day went at least thirty thousand times.

If you researched the pathway to change, you’d notice the graph looks eerily similar to the pathway of grief. Both more or less begin with denial and end with acceptance. According to whom? I want to ask.

I begin to feel sad about the possibility of losing her—a possibility that exists between all humans at all times, which makes it so painfully ordinary that I can’t imagine acknowledging its presence out loud.

I feel like I am losing her, that I am always in the middle of losing her.

I know that I’ve spent my entire life convinced I wasn’t real unless I was loving someone with everything I had.

“Being with you feels like wearing an old fuzzy sweatshirt. When I take it off, pieces of you stick to me.”

“I worry about her,” I say. “She has the influential skills of a dictator and the organizational skills of a wedding planner. A terrifying combination.”

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.

These stories burrow their way into my cells and make a nest. It feels like coming home, over and over again, the bedroom light on, your body silhouetted at the window.

I know I am growing obsessive, but I don’t know any other way to grow.