a litany of disclosures

rewriting my narrative through prose and poetry

[discloareyousure]

human desire

I didn't want a life like this

who would?

(like we get to choose, like we get to select

our desire, or life)

I would term it - an unfilled vessel

I filled it with emptiness, I starved myself for a couple years

wandered through forests, in my mind,

in my life, gorged on anything

have you ever felt that way?

do you look at yourself in the mirror (smile at yourself, draw your mouth in silly ways, does your sweater sink - do you question the way your body looks)

My body sat in a school bus at four in the morning, I liked the window seat but nobody wanted to sit near me

so I filled myself with water to satiate the want

now I'm suspended inside a glass globe

and a hip bone, isolated, or part of a whole

it's difficult to say - it juts out like mermaid curvature

did I want this?

to cut through the air like ice, draw fluid shapes in clear blue, a sillocone body

I wanted doritos

I'm a cold body,

here in this bed tonight, here over the sink

here with my socks drawn up over these raw-boned ankles

are you cold too?

I'll tell you what I wanted,

I wanted

honesty, I wanted to be able

to look you in the eye

(I wanted you to look back at me, only me, I wanted irrational, cowardly, selfish, mundane, flawed, terrible, human things)

I wanted to look myself in the eye

I wanted you to like me, most of all

I wanted to like myself, every day

I wanted you to like me the way I liked myself, I wanted you to see me smile, see that I could live

I wanted me, every day

I wanted to return to myself and smile

I wanted

to puke, I wanted

you to stay

I wanted many things, and

I really wanted

to stop wanting

I wanted you, most of all

I wanted me

[discloareyousure]

all I could offer

If I could offer you anything at all, anymore I’d give you an apology for the apology that never came out of my mouth for all the apathy that these bandaids try to contain

if I could give you anything at all now I’d give you all my remembrances, lined with the desperation of a child trying to hold on to a helium-swept balloon —all of which will go unanswered, like forsaken prayer

the days I lived without a heartbeat the days I forgot how to breathe

I’d give you years and years of trying to look for a home in someone I thought I knew, the way the sky tries to seep in between the cracks in the trees like it’d find anything there but more space to look through, more room to long for even just a trace of familiarity

but that’s the thing, isn’t it hiding spots remain hiding spots, you wouldn’t go there looking to be found

I’d give you leftover pizza that I brought for lunch in eighth grade and a piece of paper that I keep with me; beguile, folded three times over the ache in my elbows as they press down on a pillow whenever my mother’s around

I look through the window in lieu of television and it rains often, day after day

[discloareyousure]

Hypotheticals

So, consider this: we were both there, in the airless space between a

crowd. Outside of ordinary time, ordinary atoms. In fine color.

Consider we are real, with real capacity to open. Open like the jessamines we are.

My wide-eyed teenage girl revelry. The

way you make every other voice a floating

thing. Needless movement. Everything is strange and

divine with you. Real with you.

Say I would smile at you. And you smile back. Now we're fools, and only fools rush

in. As long as it's something that opens,

right? Petals. Aureole. Bodies. Soul-stirring things, these.

And birds would pelt dead against the windows, a red wedding. This is a

hypothetical. If life emanates, so should death. It is only fair. So we're smiling, so

it's a fatal thing.

But death? Worse things have happened. Like how I dream about you

every night, all your violence singing me sweet.

Your body must reek of my longing. My thorned love. My perennial question:

does your body know to stay in a way that won't kill me?

[discloareyousure]

i am not okay with this (2020)

[discloareyousure]

drive

it’s a bit much, isn’t it. that seems to be the closing consensus always, it’s a bit much. too much of movement, then too much of inertia, then just too much of it being too much.

the sky, once again the sky, seems to be in a hurry, would you slow down— and i’m sitting still inside this car, but everything seems to be moving at 2x speed. but then again, that is how cars work. you sit still and the world moves around you. my mind aligns to the rhythm, regardless, and a car of unforeseen tangibility zooms past me inside my own head.

the roads whip past me remorselessly, and i become the punctuation between two sentences - where i’m going and where i’ve been, strangely belonging to neither place. that in-between state of being stateless, the impermanence of it.

but it’s all moving too fast. i’m talking, waving my arms around like look at me, i’m playing the role of someone i think you’ll like, and for one fourth fraction of a second it’s all going well. i’m saying my lines the way i’m supposed to, tucking my hair behind my ears neatly.

it’s all going the way it’s supposed to.

isn’t it?

wasn’t it, just a second ago?

[discloareyousure]

ripped jeans

“do you like my ripped jeans?”

i can see that you don’t. the faint distaste, it’s a sight i’m too familiar with - to the point where i can feel its presence even when it isn’t there. what happened to you? who treated you this way? i can’t answer you. i can’t. i think it was me, i think i did this to me. i’m not insane, i didn’t bully myself into devastation like this, there were a handful, of course. but i wish i’d have processed it differently. i wish it’d had made me stronger, resilient, tough as sculpted quartz - but it made me this paper-thin ghost, see-through frail fabric torn to the bones. it made me weak. it made me weak. it made me weak.

“they’re nice,” you tell me. it’s sticky, like moisture that hangs in humid, sweltering summers, where the days last longer than the thoughts in your brain, and you look outside the window and you wish for it all to be over, please just be over already. it’s sticky on my mouth, the smile i try to wear and the muscles in my mouth screech like an unoiled door hinge.

but you, you could care less. you turn back to your friend and you talk and talk, and how am i just stuck here. how is this day going on since i was eleven. i look down at my ripped jeans and it’s all burning, i’m a house on fire and every room screams in shame. i’d ask you for a fire extinguisher but you’d look at me like i was insane.

why did i have to ask you? why do i want your approval? i resent myself for it and i resent you for depriving me of it. and this is what we’re left with at the end, just this silence and my resentment that i’ll project onto you until my mind can figure out how this elevator works, why none of the buttons seem to take me anywhere.

[discloareyousure]

and now

I’ve forgotten to keep track of what day it is, my mind is coiled, beeping like a microwave and I’m setting the table for lunch Five plates, desi yellow with a flower pattern so traditional the sixth plate still back home day and night churning for coin I feel his four-walled enclosure in my own chest sometimes it’s an incomprehensible feeling and here, my mother’s arguing relentlessly, next door neighbor emotional affair, the phone just ringing and ringing and silence when it’s just mom and dad, kya? what did you say? over frivolous one-sided video calls and the sentence that’s repeated always comes out so angry acha, I hear my dad say while I’m peeling garlic cloves on the dining table and I think acha and the aching raw familiarity of those two syllables resounds inside me silently reciprocation, that’s the word humans can’t seem to get right

Feel something for me and I can’t promise I’ll ever feel the same for you

It’s a shame, but we aren’t the same person, my emotions call for a lighthouse while yours look for a burning campfire. Leave me alone and I might drown for you too someday

and now, and now

it’s somewhere in the PM I’m parched so I leave the bed to drink some water, the sensation of it so purposeful, I’m all empty and I can feel every individual molecule of the water slide inside my throat like my eyes taking in every individual thread of my body in the bathroom mirror, new to me somehow as if I’d forgotten, as if I blink and I’m blinded by the flash of my own eyes what does it mean but more importantly what does it matter?  Next door neighbor see the lights turn on, just another painful memory I never got to tell anyone about it’s the resentment! it’s the fear, it’s the isolation! and then there’s the late night drive in the back of my mind, blue signs and white tea cup in a matching saucer, dood ki chai milky like childhood milky like the aftertaste of nostalgia The road wet with blithe Indian showers the only thing that’s glittering the cars that pass by no longer poetic or charming, just strangers in the dead of the night, cold indifference too much for me to handle, please take me home my hoodie’s not big enough for this and now, and now I’m in a strangers house and I feel bare like a pair of hands, gloveless the night air got to me it’s inside me like a pair of bones and I’m in a classroom all alone if only you could come pick me up, dad, and I could try to be your little girl again your mini-me sunshine child just careless and dancing and laughing in your light, dream-spun stars tucked in between my crooked teeth and remember that it’s only Friday and school’s out for the summer stay home and play videogames all day

and now, and now

I’ve been choked with the stone of 19 In my mouth, and the repetition of be strong be strong be strong be strong like an unending dictionary of pain avoidance

and every word just a synonym for pain 

[discloareyousure]

3, 2, 1

every second, the heart says I’m here, I’m beating, you’re alive like a rosemary prayer in your own name

and if my memory was an analog frame, the only shot I’d own would be the view from my bed. guitar, a polyester flower, and a makeshift vanity.

If these are the pieces that comprise of me, then I’m a threadbare sweater unravelling at the seams

the girl in the blue hoodie who could never keep her fingertips from turning blue. the poet who couldn’t ever read her poetry with her own eyes, the girl with a head filled with NyQuil and violent delusions,

the girl that would flicker                        in and out of reality

like an overused lightbulb

my memory, so permanent and unmoving: every temporary image engulfs me, every feeling becomes the only feeling I’ve ever felt. car rides, gold-awashed moments and scarce laughter: vaporized, nonexistent, used clothes thrown out the window — was I even there at all?

3, 2, 1. Happy new year. Laughter. I’m seeing you through your eyes and you’re cheering with your friends, mouth wide open like a lamplight. the fireworks burst inside the memoryscape of your eyes. 3, 2, 1. Happy new year. and I’m just here, 

somewhere

[discloareyousure]

phone conversation

i. I’m tired, mom. I’m calling you

because I want you to make it go away, though I know the feasibility of that is as

real as me actually calling you. I’m sorry I can’t bring myself to do it, it’s just that my

mouth is a graveyard where I bury confessions

and my heart is still young,

doesn’t know how to handle this pain

except for accepting it as if it were confectionary, drawing its knees up and drifting into sleep as if sleep were a river.

ii. In my dreams I walk up to you, no less hesitant than a mouse, you’re at the kitchen sink doing dishes. unwittingly I did

something that I knew you wouldn’t like

and I’m hoping so desperately that you don’t look back at me, not yet

not when I’m holding myself as still as a captive. you start to speak but your words

don’t sound like your own. I go blue in the face from trying to choke my sobs down, I just want your words to sound like your own for once.

iii. In my dreams I have a scarf around my neck that’s as tight as a rope

and your face is the knife I need to cut it loose. If I could just bring myself to talk to

you, meet your eyes without mine spilling like loose change on the dining table, maybe we could fix this.

I feel myself go bloodless sometimes, do you know? other times I fold my body into indefinable shapes, twists of bad origami

until I fit into a drawer inside someone else’s mind. I want to make sense

to somebody, is that criminal?

I write words like throwing rocks inside a river, lost without any recognition

something bad happened here, say

people when they come to visit. The water echoes silently, burdened with corpses. Just something weighing

down on itself, a collusion that detests its own physicality.

just something to grieve over.

iv. could you call me instead, mom?

[discloareyousure]

You

Meet me at sunset, you said to me. I remember it well: your voice blithe

like blue denim, like gravel

the rough underside of a forgotten memory—

I’ve been trying to solve the geometrical equation of your shoulders, you know

they’ve always been so sharp,

so acutely sparrowlike

a bilateral line of poised arrows.

and it’s something else, how you manage to look so ordinary,

just a girl in a jacket

just a girl with smile like a weapon, your eyes soundless.

It’s like, the sun has an aftertaste, and its poetic obsession seems intrusive

like powdery white lines of light, cocaine or molasses

I want to tell you, it feels like I’ve known you my whole life.

The low timbre of your voice sits under my

tongue, possesses me like a spirit.

I want to speak

but words don’t belong to me anymore. It feels like I’ve known you my whole life, but you haven’t known me even for half of it.

The sun drowns itself in fits of reds and violets, loses all desire to burn. Dawn unravels inside me.

I become incomplete and repetitive;

keep breathing the same breath in a universe where there’s no other way to breathe.

[discloareyousure]

how to be heard / how to make the earth listen

Say animal sacrifice. The woods of you. Say blade, horror, blood purple with machoism. Say anything but this, please. This contingency. This disembodied longing. Say bed, say walls, say room, light, window. Maybe a gazebo, if you're lucky. But then comes the walk through the great hall. Then comes the presenting, the hair-up song and dance, your smile a white-knuckled fist on the steering wheel. Now dinner. Now left turn signal. How you split yourself in half like veal. Always picking at your nails. Always gnawing. The raw meat of yourself. Then say, I am outside of me. I am the world outside of this body. But there's nothing revolutionary about speaking to the mountains like they are something to be trusted. You bandage the trust of your ribs. Why do you do this? Is it something in the air? Say there's nothing to worry about when you're sixteen and dying. Say l'appel du vide. Say navigation, say none of this is real and all the colors mute into death. Say chemicals. Say biology. Your words mean something. The shape of your mouth curls around the chilling nature of cognition, immolation. Then talk about the self. How it thrives under certain realities. How it thunders. Now say daily fabric. Say it again. Stubborn existence. Say it till you strain, your voice stinging like a thread. Say birth, a condemnation. The taut skin of the earth. The wrist on your wrist, air stirring with vindication. Say confessional. Say this will make a tongue in my mouth.

[discloareyousure]

It’s December,

the world has slithered in the projected direction of ahead and this time, in an effort to soothe our sanity, we’ve replaced the windows with paintings of stilted scenery. There’s a particular angle to it from where you can see the density of the trees washed in ultraviolet the green looks lovely with the history of emotional abandonment, dear seems to be the general consensus among guests,  and it does. There’s no finer color  that pairs this well with misgivings.

Days, measured by cups of green tea and time, by the reflected image inside when the cups are raised—a conviction of the self, of reality, of the generation of delicate millisecond thoughts, invisible and soundless: the pictures that move and the ones that don’t, it’s not as permanent as it seems, then why do these images behind my eyes never change? It’s heedless, unordinary, inextricable how aware and unaware the mind can be at the same time.

The houseplants breathe cautiously, while I perform breathing exercises. Socks on the bedroom floor, birthday cake in the fridge. What good is an animal with no survival instincts? Honey, there’s ice cream in the freezer, quit disintegrating on the couch and help yourself to a serving. Birthday cake on the bedroom floor ice cream on the bedroom floor your socks inside the fridge. In, out, in, out, in, out.

Unfeeling as an ice-gripped limb, I pad through living room floors.