the_very_last_last_last_letter(final.final) (2)
not even after all this time
put on Become the Warm Jets by Current Joys. it’s on right now.
thinking of you is an addiction now
i try to let you pass on by me
you’ve become a pathology in me now
if i saw you in the grocery store like you said you wanted
and wouldn’t you feel so happy?
and would you feel any guilt from that?
the boy i knew would have.
the person i created you in my head to be.
that boy is an armed man?”
and here i am, in your living room
and all my poems are about you
and they have been for years now.
the very, very last letter?
this last fantasizing about you,
gagged, blindfolded even,
to shield me from that fury behind your eyes.
and how do i join these two worlds—
“honesty,” you’d answer, “just be goddamn
honest for once,” you’d plead.
my loved ones call you a psychopath.
i present them with the bare facts
even still i self-immolate in grief;
my loved ones now put out the fires
you lit in me so long ago.
they say 16 was too young for you.
they say that the things you’d say to me
that the things you did to me are unforgivable.
they’ve broken out the psychology textbooks, and the slideshows,
are able to explain up and down why
sometimes i can’t help but not believe them.
you wove your way into my DNA.
i can’t shake you, i can’t,
it’s pathological. it’s disordered. it’s post-traumatic.
and wasn’t it you, that said you felt the only way to get me to love you was to hurt me?
when did you realize? that you were right?
everyone who knows me knows you,
and everyone who loves me hates you.
but i still look for you in the grocery store.
i put my makeup on in the car in case
when i leave, i’m always disappointed.
so i stopped doing the shopping.
the very last letter will say that i’ve started shopping again. that i don’t scan the aisles for you.
it has been, for years now,
but it’s never over for me.
maybe someday it will be.
and i haven’t written about you in all this time.
this last, last, very last letter to you.
i cant put it on a calendar—
it faded, as all wounds do.
i stopped noticing the scars, even.
stopped covering them with makeup, even.
i look for it on my body,
there, just under my hips,
a thin white smattering of scars.
i only see them now when i look close.
stack them neat in a drawer.
for academic study, later.
the blood ink has long dried,
i place them without hesitation
into that drawer of past loves.
you’ve become one of the others,
not unshakable, metastasizing you.
the monster under my bed and
in my closet and in the hallway
has faded into something less