I spent most of my Easters on lonely plane flights back and forth to see the family I no longer felt I had any part in. When the phone rang, I held my breath as if the person on the other line could hear me. And when the voicemails piled up, I felt sick for days with guilt. I had murdered my nuclear family; I didn't deserve the extended branch on my mother's side who still loved me. I abandoned my father's name, killing time in the purgatory before some guy seven to ten years older would offer me his. The one aunt from my father's side who still sent me messages saying, "Hey Sweetie, happy Easter and may God Bless u" never got an answer from me. I was ensconced in my city by the lake and I spent most every day shoring up my defenses against my own past. I never invited anyone to come see me anymore and I didn't celebrate anything, not even holy days of obligation. I rolled my eyes at my best friend's text messages before sending back responses so bland they almost sounded kind. I wanted to strangle anyone who ever felt at ease in my hometown anymore.
I called my brother so we could talk about nothing and when people asked me how he was, I said he was good even though he was an alcoholic who felt constantly lonely. I'm sure he said I was good, too.
Someone once told me you don't have to take everything with you. I carried it, still.
To my boyfriends, the ones seven to ten years older than me which dated those flat years in my mid-twenties when I should have been falling desperately in love, I recounted story after story, whittling my bones down to fine, flayed points. I fed them scraps from the table of my body so they could pretend they were full, So that, by the time I fed them the story of the high school boyfriend who left me, the last boy who every called it off before I could cut and run, they thought they knew me. To them, that story whispered that I would crush them. To them, it didn't reveal the truth around which my spine curled: if I were to be hurt again, I felt I might die of it.
When you swing yourself from one disappointment to the next, you can form your pain into a kind of chrysalis. You can convince yourself that everything you bury will one day bloom, beautiful. But nothing is ever truly buried, is it? I was still sweating out my own abandonment in the haze of a thousand hangovers. I was like an apparition in a b-movie horror, still reenacting a final trauma.
Someone once told me that ghosts could be purified with salt and sage, but I never tried for fear I'd lose something.
I tried never to imagine my father. I tried never to call up the image of him curled with his own demons in the too-harsh light of early spring mornings. When I heard he lost another job, I didn't answer my phone for a week, always anticipating the next call would be one to prayer. Always waiting for my sister's broken voice, saying he'd been found in a garage somewhere or the side of a mountain, though I knew my father would never go anywhere that jagged to die. The mountains belonged to my mother, and she swore that was the one thing he couldn't take. When the lake effect settled into my bones on my way to work some cold April morning, I stopped shivering. My father, like me, would continue to survive. We had cockroach blood.
In my nightmares, he was smiling at me over the washer-dryer in my childhood home. Imagine that: a nightmare which is just your own father with a smile on his face. I woke in the beds of men seven to ten years older than me, cold sweat sinking from my body into their sheets. They never noticed; their beds were more than big enough for the both of us.
Someone once told me you can be just as lonely in a room of people as you could be all alone. I knew.
Somewhere on the west coast lived a hope I had, something I was saving like a frozen slice of wedding cake. Late at night, I tried to siren him closer to me. I would slip my dresses from my spine and show him the black hole in my chest, begging. Maybe there was bred into me an insatiable want. Maybe it was vestigial. Whatever it was, we kept our lighthouses bright, beams pulling at each other. Only with him could I keep my mouth dripping sweet with the voice of the girl I was before. Over a course of years, I was allowed to shed layer after layer. The world’s slowest strip tease, only letting a veil drop when I was absolutely ready. There was safety in distance, and on the brink of disaster.
When there were arms wrapped around me, I felt they could hear the hollowness in my shakes. I felt they could hear him calling through my desert lungs. But never did anyone smoke him out of me, tug him from my hair like pins. I kept his name sewn into my cheek and waited like a girl at a bus stop, hands shoved into my pockets, close to numb.
Someone once told me the fantasy of longing makes everything sweet enough to rot you from the inside. I welcomed it.
On my best days, I was efficient as a knife. Sharp and quick, I could cut through my city like the shark I pressed into my skin. More than once I got six blocks from a person before realizing they weren’t at my side. Always they asked me what I was hurrying toward, why I was in such a rush. It seemed too strange a way to ask if I wanted to die. Anymore I couldn’t give a straight answer, anyway.
On my best days, I was silent as a grave. Without the men seven to sen years older than me, I could go days without hearing my own voice. Waiting til the point that I stepped out of my shower with smoke rising from my skin, looked in the mirror, and saw nothing. I tried not to think about the fact that I’d wasted twenty years of my life wishing I were pretty and now all I wanted was to be invisible. All I wanted was a facial scar so long and jagged, it became the only feature of my body. All I wanted was to burn away my own features until I could finally see what would be left.
Someone once told me we give more power to the stories we tell ourselves than to the truth. I never knew any other way to survive.
