Run around this broken, foreign city like a marionette, trying to find myself a warm sponge bath, and a hand to hold that won’t prickle my thumbs and ask me questions I’m not prepared to answer yet. Where’d you go today? Just away, just all of me, like I sometimes do, finding gardens, but not guardians, seeking magic by old stoplights, remembering sweets I bit off as a child and never completely swallowed.
Encounter myself drawn more to witches than to pauper kings, my stories all transitioned from men’s hearts to crones’ weariness, even though in my inner foray, I still know the former best. I wasted years learning them, only to discover I was first supposed to understand myself, and now don’t, and what then?
In case of biting, how do I stop myself from becoming shy at the first next peck against my cheek? It could be about you, but started long before you, the way I love you, the gnashing inside my head made of lies regurgitated still. How can I save you from the lies my head’s been filled with, and if I’m shy, will you still turn on the light, or do you prefer making love to me in the dark?
And will it be for your comfort, or mine?
I’d like to tell you you look for me in every woman you encounter and will do so, always, except that’s not exactly accurate. I’m no Penelope to deceive myself thus, but the truth is, you are looking for something. The man you were while loving me, and understand bittersweet and too late by much you’ll never again be that man, and isn’t that terrible, and isn’t that strange? How easily we lose these snippets of ourselves we thought we’d be able to hold on to forever.
It turns out people don’t amble into our lives for no reason. From that day forward, you do a double-take on every last woman you meet, searching for traces, for hints that she might hold that secret armor that weighed your shoulders heavy when you first met me, and find yourself biting your tongue, always wanting.
You’ll say it’s me, except you never loved me for me. Because even doing your level-best, you can only ever really love me as some Other, not as you do your own tinge-tint soul, and why should you? Is it true that the people we love best, we love only for ourselves? That they’re there in some way gate-bearers to our own life – and doesn’t that put every injury and stalemate in a different, flash-red-at-the-stop-sign light?
And you, a high-strung arpeggio of a man, bottle-heavy, bellow-of-the-valley, that I’ve looked inside my future and seen myself wanting. I am too young to hide inside the forest, men follow me there still, reminding me it is not my time, and that is not yet my place.
Yet. I’m frightened of you. Grow wary of you and feel myself with every passing hour grow farther from you, grow strange. You look for someone to help put on your armor, while I look for someone who will take mine off and not leave me raw and chaffed during the interval. I hoard my silences to myself, greedy dragon that I am, captain of all my hard-earned treasure. I would show them to you, except I know better than to brandish and lambaste the sins of the father.
I’ve arrived at a strange sort of age, where I understand myself rather well. It wasn’t lightly earned, and too much dirt has gone under my boots to let me break my silences simply because you wonder at the words I do not tell. I’ve learned the wealth of keeping inside myself the ways in which I’m vulnerable, but tender, also. That, also, hasn’t been lightly earned. Only I know how many times I’ve bit back my tongue and wiped bloody spit off my chin. If I paint myself with violence, it’s only because I’ve lost foot of my tribe, and fear myself exposed in the coming war. And know myself, despite the many things I hide from you still, to be only just tender at the core.
You. You’ll look for me in all women, and for yourself in every word, but the truth is, they were never really about you. They’re not about any one man, existing and ghostlike both at once, no father-framing face-altered stranger with good intentions and a wolfish grin on his lapel. No wolfish grins but mine in this story, and this can’t be about you for the simple fact it couldn’t be.
I keep space in my words only for myself, and look outward, between embraces, for where I thought you should be.
You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames
It would be deceptive to say I ever found comfort in this song. Not exactly. But I always recognized a certain twinge of familiarity there, as I supposed is the way of most good art. The murkiness of existing that’s held now between my bare feet, and that I try to revisit from time to time in my writings.
At times, too often, I’ve more thoughts than is probably good for me.
