One day, last fall, I wrote this down: violence turns the person it was inflicted upon into an object. We make bodies a commodity by which we measure the successes of war. We think of victims as evidence. If you watch CNN long enough, you might forget for a moment your own humanity.
Sometimes I forget I have a name, and a soul. That I’m a person who inhabits a body. Sometimes I forget these things about everyone around me.
If you pile them high enough, bodies can cease to be people at all.
On the question of a soul, I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. If you choose to believe in the concept of souls, which I do, you might generally think of a soul as the essence of a person, as their truest inner self, as the thread binding together the core of them. Sometimes I imagine my soul like an orb– in my mind, it’s emerald green and burning inside my chest. Somewhere right between my lungs. Usually though, I don’t think of it all. And if I tried hard enough, I could surely never think of it again.
A few weeks ago, on a hot June day, I wrote down: love turns the person you inflict it upon into an idea. You can make anyone anything you want. Love is a hostile act.
There is a thing poetry does in which you talk about one thing when you’re speaking of another. The way I’m always talking about the moon when I’m talking about a man. In which I’m actually talking about myself. Because all I’m ever looking for in a man is the person I want to be. Hannah says, “You shouldn’t sleep with someone unless you would want to be them.”
I want to be them, not be with them, which is the problem, which has always been the problem. All I’m ever looking for in a man is the idealized version of myself that I’ve created in my mind and which I can never live up to and so I guess I’d rather just be near it for a while, if I can.
You can make anyone anything you want. All I’m ever looking for in a man is exactly what I’m describing when I’m always talking about the moon which is all I want for myself– be clear, be unchanging, be waiting for me every night. Spin gently around me as I go and move my tides with your strength and your vision. All I need is the moon, and I’ve been telling all of you that for years. Sure, I want the rain and the storm and the field and the shadow and the skin, but I need the moon.
The thing I can’t write down but which I want to say, and what all of this is a way of saying, is that I am sorry that I had to break your heart. I am sorry that my heart was broken first. Cruelty turns like a tide, and I’ve yet to learn to harness its power. I’m always ricocheting back from my own tenderness towards a place of violence. In the same way someone once plunged a knife into my side, I needed to pull it out and do the same to you. In the same way a man once shoved my face into brick, I had to pull apart your heart in my hands. I am sorry this is the only way I knew, then, how to heal. I am sorry I hurt you so I could begin to scab, and I am sorry I smiled while I did it.
I have been so cruel for so many weeks. Months now, I suppose. Maybe a year. When I was younger, I inflicted all my rage, all my anger, all my hurt onto myself. I flung myself into walls, against sharp edges.
Then, one day, I learned to break a heart, a skill you can only learn once someone does it to you. Like cutting hair. And I am sorry.
Last week, on a blank July morning, I wrote down: treat me like a campground.
Inhabit me and burn me, then leave me in the morning? I couldn’t tell you what it meant when I wrote it down. I wrote it down after a bottle of wine, which is how I write these days. It’s not how I rewrite though, not all of the time.
Cruelty turns like a tide, and we all take turns. In the same way those men hurt me, I circled round back again and hurt others. In the same way I hurt them, they did unto others. If everything is a pattern, surely we could trace it back to its source like a riverbed. In the same way I’ve, again and again, traced the blues of my own veins, I could follow these cruel habits back to where they began but in the same way I’ve chosen not to think about my soul, I will choose to stay still instead.
If I could apologize, would it make a difference? Could you forgive me? Could I forgive myself? Have I learned a damn thing?
I mean to tell you all the ways I have once felt and how sorry I am for making you feel those same ways. I mean to say all that, which is why I’m always talking about the moon. Which is why I’m always talking. Why is why I’m writing it down now.
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