I'm not real, but I pretend I am in words.
June 18, 2011
-
Unredeemable
I still remember spending all day in my bed, and you drew all over my body like you owned it, until I was covered in skulls and words and crazed ephemera, and we listed to The Doors American Prayer, thrumming in the background of our sex and heat and art.
But you hated yourself, and me for loving you, and your art suffered on my body with bruises and blood between us, so when you left I found a man who picked weedy flowers from in front of his house while I sat on the porch staring at the river and the railroad tracks. He handed them up to me where I was, legs hanging down off wooden slats, overgrown grass teasing them, and I knew it was to say he was sorry - sorry for you and what you’d done to me, sorry for being a man.
We walked in that river all summer and came in at night to the sodden humidity of what used to be a slave cabin, a rented hovel where we walked up crooked stairs to his bedroom and sweated out the night in fast, hard sex that wasn’t good, but we wrecked ourselves fucking that year and I didn’t care, I was there for the sweetness, the poetry written for me, the goddamn cornflowers growing like grass along the tracks.
The river rocks cut my feet and one day I stumbled as we walked across to the other side, not realizing the deep, the current, the danger. Holes in my hands and feet, and we made it back, him carrying me, and he washed my feet in his bath, cleaning away the dirt, the blood, and is it any wonder, no matter how many years later, that when I was left with no one, no flowers, no one to hold me when I cried, no one to forgive me, is it any fucking wonder that I found the one man who would never leave me, who would wash away the dirt and blood and sin and let me forget who I’d been?
Your drawings, his flowers, stolen things - they are tattooed on my skin.
Forgetting will only get you so far, and once you wake up from the dream of being washed clean, there’s nowhere left to go but down, down into a hell of one’s own making.
