am i your favourite guard dog?

finn, he/him, adult. photos taken by me. main @badtzbot

[muzzle-and-ink]

i fold like origami paper - your gentle hands and fingertips imbued with passion making quick work of most of me, your voice and sweet words tearing down the rest. mortar and stone walls put up over and over, each time stronger, taller than the last, i'm done with love, i think, it's never worth it - these walls collapse in an instant with the swipe of your thumb, hard rock turned malleable as clay.

you say that you're a man of few words but i could write all the poetry in the world and it wouldn't compare to the sound of your smile when you speak to me, like the sun shining on your face after an eternity of high walls, of shadows.

your hands and your eyes and your smile and your voice coax me into the creases, valleys and hills, folding, unfolding, movement and beauty and art; you coax me into happiness, i tell you that i only ran into the sunlight because that's where you were, and your laugh sounds like the most beautiful instrument.

she had crumpled that paper, creased it permanently, valleys and ridges broken, jagged, random - but i fold pliant and behaved under your hands, i trust you to smooth out the wrinkles, start on a clean slate, i trust your hands and your mouth and your eyes to whisper to me a truth i so desperately want to believe.

i trust you to make me into something beautiful, but more than that, i am content just to be in your capable hands.

[muzzle-and-ink]

i miss you only in the murky waters where i don't quite reach the bottom, where i tread to stay afloat and the mud hides the depth. i miss you when windows fog up and the landscape outside becomes a blur, when streaks of dulled colour could be mistaken for the wheat of your hair or the sound of your laugh. i miss you like i miss the smell of boot polish, like a once familiar ritual with fingers too worn-down to even begin reattempt.

but i remember the dull pain of you with a striking clarity, reflection on the shine of a blade, of a silver choke chain, of begging you to hurt me in more ways than just letting the leash fall from your hands. don't you understand?

don't you get it, that i would've taken cutting words and the pulling of my beating heart from my chest over all else?

if i could not have a loving grasp then i would have taken claws dug into flesh, would have let you tear me apart, asunder. instead, fingers too tender for one who intended only to probe, much too tender in proximity to the most vulnerable of my insides. you did not dig into the viscera, but i wish you did. i wish you hurt me on purpose, instead of this stunning stunted half-realization-apology-acknowledgement-insecurity.

i miss you on rainy days, now, and my stomach still fails to digest what it's given, because the lining shrinks to remember the scraps given by your hands, by those tender fingers. i miss you - but only in memories, what-ifs, blurry vision and the half-light of my morning commute.

it will be summer, soon, bright sun and absence of rain, and i will pry those tender fingers away from my insides.

[badtzbot]

some days i feel like an abused dog. mangy and scared with all my teeth on the outside, gums pink bare and rotting. can't eat, there's danger here. ears clipped, fur matted. teeth (pat my head, pull me close, tell me all the things about me that aren't wrong) on the outside. i can't take phonecalls anymore, especially not my parents. no one understands what the barking means. pat my head, please. please - touch without expectation or pain. please. pat my head, hold me close, let me- no. teeth on the outside, gums rubbed raw and red and an effort to chew it up and spit it out. no one understands the barking. days pass with the weight of shame tying me down, gums inflamed again and again. barking, barking, no one understands. please, won't somebody hear me? won't you hold me close and tell me I'm not irreparable? no, don't hold me close. my teeth are on the outside and there is nothing soft to be pet. woof, woof. mangy, scared. irreparable.

[badtzbot]

at the heart of me there is just a a little kid who wants to peel tangerines and pomegranates for you, who wishes you would never hurt again, who wants only the best for you because you're my friend. who would hug you - all of you - with open arms, who would fiercely tell you that you were safe now, who would want nothing more than to make you smile.

[badtzbot]

and the thing about being an immigrant kid is this: the way i lash out at my mother sounds the exact same, intonation and all, as the way she talks to her mother over the phone, and i hate her with all my guts but love her with all my heart. i wish i had never known her and i knead her head when it aches. there is a festering thing inside me that is black and withered, bitter for this forced legacy - an honour, they say, so maybe it is more like one of those dried goji berries that she puts in the rice porridge we make on sunday mornings. and i never went to church, but i still felt like a mortal in the presence of god - how could i not, how could my parents be human? they were godlike in power, godlike in the way they cared so very much and so very little for me, always, always, in the wrong way.

the thing about being an immigrant kid is this: how do you learn to be loved when all you've ever known is harsh reprimand, warm rice porridge, and filial piety?

[muzzle-and-ink]

and i will say this:

when we were 14, a whole lifetime ago, I would save every picture you sent me like if I just believed hard enough, I could become religious - like the crinkle at the corner of your eyes could substitute the burn of a candle, like just imagining the way your hair, dry and frizzy, felt under my fingertips could take the place of a rosary.

When I was 16, 17, my mother had this phase where she would take the whole family out on weekend outings, usually outdoors - conservation areas, national parks, especially when no one else had any suggestions. I had only one request out of all those weekends, I wanted to return to a restaurant my father had taken me to some half-a-decade ago, to again have those crispy fried noodles with seafood gravy that had lived in some tender part of my mind for some time after.

In those days, I was taught not to make requests, to be thankful for anything I was given, not religious in a way that mattered to a church but religious in the way that my parents were immigrants and had given up their whole lives so that I could have a better one. No requests - especially not monetary - so imagine my surprise when my mother said yes, when we went to that restaurant some sixty kilometers away, when I got to taste those noodles again. They were as good as I remembered, but not as good as I had hoped. Nostalgia makes better stories, but good stories make unclear truths.

you betrayed me in ways i can never fully articulate, allowed me to bare tender flesh and vulnerable underbelly knowing that you would bite not with sharp, loyal fang, but with millions of teeth like a leech, a parasite, some sort of vile infection. you let me think that the only way i could be loved was through pity, and the only way i could love others was with the air of a stray dog who had never really known about home.

Walking with my youngest sister down those streets near the noodle place, we found this bar - just opening up for the night, somewhere around 4pm or thereabouts - she, still a kid kid, didn't quite know what a bar was yet, but saw fairy lights and a kind man behind the counter and went inside. I picked up three stock-card coasters from there, one of a local brewery and one of each design the bar had of it's own logo.

I've moved a lot in the last five years, physically and digitally - only four months in a place before moving again, three laptops, a stylus, five mice, and two keyboards. Along the way, some things get lost. I have one of the three coasters left, still sitting under my waterbottle (the sixth one) on my desk (the first one, ever, the one that I grew up with) beside my computer mouse (the third one, dug out of storage for my work computer). still, i have added three thick cardstock coasters to my collection recently - all three nabbed from the matcha place downtown, all three touched by my fingertips that have grown and shed long past any cells that have ever touched you.