Weapons

Sometimes I find myself incapable of disconnection with others, in ways that feel like I have little say regarding the matter. As if my bones were cast in the same molds, by the same hands, under the same sun. As if the pigmentation placed outside of both my pupils was picked in honor of her favorite time of day. I could not tell you what that timeframe is if I were to sit and rattle off the things I know concerning her. I would only be capable of painting out the room in which I laid when at first she mentioned being partial to the color. Glass that called to me and heights that sang, my ever turning fan blades encased inside their plastic tomb. A fake flower that she plucked from up on some old building’s second story where we had sat to eat fried pickles and cast our gaze down on the public. I think that was the first thing that I had to rid myself of when I ran off in my unending anxious way. I have this thing about me that whispers in my ear and tells me that the things that people say once they’ve come close cannot be trusted, I think my Mother almost murdering me plays a part in it. I think that when there’s space enough for weapons to be drawn, I don’t have the means to make up stories in my head about the people in my life. It’s when the crevices between my ribs are placed on full display that tension twists and turns below the surface of my skin. I wonder what the motivation lying just behind their words might be. I wonder what new wounds I may endure and how soon the bond will break after it’s made. Sometimes I’m back inside that room and looking out from many flights above the streetlights. Sometimes she’s barely gone and I’m about to be back in the bath. I think I need something from her that I have only ever had a taste of, at times I think it’s violence and at others it’s her fingers in a dance upon my neck. The hunger stems from something in my stomach that the doctors call a pit. At times it’s cold and vast while at others it’s not there. I’m always pacing back and forth while staying still, in my attempts to place a finger on what causes it to leave. Perhaps the way she looks at me, perhaps the freckles on her face and how they spell out constellations I have never come across. I’ve walked and walked with automatic weapon, with luggage and a bottle or a broken heart below the stars. Perhaps it’s when she says my name that things calm down and feel like pens and paper in my hands, in such a way that I may write my issues out. I think that when I write I’m pushing people further than they may have been if I had broken all my fingers in the door jams of this house. If I had chewed them off and bit my tongue until it bled and had no other way of making known my bastard heart. I think my mother split my head wide open out of jealousy. I think she burned my hand because she saw the light. I think she cut my face to make me uglier than her and at times I think it worked. Perhaps it’s how she listens and instead of judging she plants kisses where I need them, not just where I want them. Perhaps it’s in the length of her patience and the promises she doesn’t make. Perhaps it’s just because she’s damaged like I am, compressed and cut and bashed and broken, folded into shapes that feel like toys to me. I think that even after war and sex and bombs and death and jail, after drugs and blood and guts and smoke and ash that I am still a little boy. I think I pick her up when things feel safe, like I’m not in any danger of the blade or tile floor or curling iron. I think I put her down and run away when I can hear my mother from the grave. She says these things that I would never speak out loud yet loud is all they are when bouncing back and forth inside my brain. Perhaps it is the way she feels there on the tip of my pink tongue or how she tastes like rain and smells of cider. Perhaps it’s how the drowning seems to stop and when I feel her hand begin its search for mine that all the water leaves the room. I think I write to tell the world who I love. I think I love her just because.