I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

by Marisa Crane

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

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.

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.

The thing about Velcro is, it collects all kinds of detritus along the way and then it no longer attaches where it’s supposed to. If a stranger happened upon a stray piece of Velcro, they’d have no way of determining where it belonged. You can usually make Velcro stick again by cleaning it, but if your Velcro is old and worn-out, you’ll have to replace it. How, then, do I rid myself of all I’ve gathered along the way?

There comes a point where the before and after must merge.

Had she been paying attention, she would have known it hadn’t happened overnight, that it took a million tiny stabs to bleed democracy dry.

Pop Quiz: Fill in the blanks: Many people in the United States find it ____ to ____ about _____ until it _____ to them.

I’ve heard it said that love is choosing to listen to how someone’s day went at least thirty thousand times. Love is saying, I am here, I am paying attention, and I care about that fight you had with your coworker. Beau, sometimes listening to you scream Fuck today, let’s go on a date was the only thing keeping me alive.

That living is time travel, too.

If one wanted to catalogue my toxic traits, one might start with my inability to understand how people’s lives keep going, even when I am not looking.

Traumatized is the word, although I didn’t want to reckon with what it meant to be traumatized in a world that would not hold me.

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

But now, it’s that very realness, a reminder that we are extremely boring creatures who must do a myriad of boring things each and every day, that grounds me in our sex, makes me trust her even more.

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.

feel an everlasting appreciation for having had the privilege of loving you and being loved by you. But I feel no grief—my grief is gone; it’s a horrible, beautiful realization. I’m now grieving the loss of my grief.