a twelve-step program for after he cheats
1. This is pesticide. This is endless mauling. This is Eve eating the apple in freeze frame, over and over again. This is a pox upon all your poxes. This is the curse of all your curses. This is a spine that has lost its will not to be spineless.
2. A kettle on the stove screams, or it whistles. Today is a screaming day. Tomorrow can be whistling.
3. And no, there wasn’t a reason for this. No reason could suffice. This isn’t a blessing in disguise, nor is it a disguise seeking to be a blessing. This is just an arrow through the palm of the hand you finally learned how to reach out to another.
4. If you break a bone it doesn’t thank its breaker. Do not thank this. That means thanking him, and that would make it right. Your heart has a chair jammed beneath the doorknob and it’s time to remove the splinters.
5. Imagine him sitting there, now, in an empty gym full of folding chairs. Imagine all of them sitting there, now, each one who betrayed you.
6. Him, with his mouth still full of her curls. And her, with her curls still full of his mouth. You can either walk the length of the gym and turn away, or you can stand in the middle and say whatever you’ve always wanted.
7. Whatever you have always wanted is to write love as your emergency contact. You’ve wanted his name to be an opera, and yours to be each piano in the background. You’ve always wanted the lump in your throat, but not the hand around your neck.
8. You can’t have both, and you can’t have nothing. What you can have is what you will make for yourself. You have been too mangled kite and he has pulled all your strings.
9. For too long, you have been the waiting room. You can be the doctor, now, and mend your own heart. You can be the one who finally sees what you refused to see.
10. He was hanging his lies outside your window like a clothesline, each one new with soap, each one polished by your hope. Take the pins, now, and not for you, but not for him either, not for a crucifixion, not for a gallows, not for voodoo.
11. For pinning every part of your map on which you can be whole again.
12. And this time, the whole map will be covered.
areudirty
tangentwithtanner
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline
