On Breaking Down and Hooking Up
You will fall in love with the knife, and then the pills, and then the back of a strangerâs car and the way a mouth can taste like salt when the lights are off. You love in the dark. You never enter a church without making sure you have something to confess for first. A man dangles his legs off the rooftop and does one more snort of cocaine and you do one more snort of life and one more fumbled condom and one more bitter shot and one more sorry about last night, one more give me your bones as rosary, one more oh please, just one more. You have been everywhere except where you are. No one loves you as much as you have never loved yourself. Your first felony was being a woman. A man in your bed pulling your face down to his through your hair, your cheeks flooded with blood, your move, his move, your move. Some day, you will find a glass eye floating in the ocean, you will find a stranded daughter, and you will remember how you would have swallowed razor blades if he had demanded it. You will ask the taste of blood in your mouth how it feels to be art, but you already know. That boy you fucked in year one. That boy from year two. That boy. The boy of someone elseâs girl. That boy who looked like a bloodhound. And some part of you dies, and the other goes on living. And every man always looks at you before he comes, as if something new will be there that was never there before. And he says Iâm going to come, thatâs what they all say, and you think, Wherever you are coming, I hope it is somewhere better than where Iâm at.
