#a fools secrets

[even-fools-are-right-sometimes]

What do you mean I'm supposed to let the wanting show through the cracks in my skin.

I want you to kiss me but my gaze will never fall naturally to your lips. I've spent too long wrangling my desire into a secret. To look at your lips would be like leaving the safe unlocked, foolish and so far against everything I know that it could only be done intentionally.

But how am I supposed to look at your lips? When? Should it be long and lingering? Confident, like an open invitation. Or should it be a fleeting glance? Unconscious, like I did it without thinking. I've never done anything without thinking about it.

How do I playact my own life, my own desires? Will it even look real now that I've thought about it?

[even-fools-are-right-sometimes]

I feel like I'm not allowed to talk about it sometimes, with how depressed everyone is. Is it alright for me to say that I'm happy?

I don't want to brag, only I do want to lay it all out; like a picnic, or an art exhibit with the title in all in bold: if this isn't nice, I don't know what is. I don't want to brag, but I want to shout it from the roof tops and breathe it in until my lungs hurt from how full they are. I didn't know I could get here and sometimes I need to say it out loud just to remind myself.

I'm the happiest I've ever been. And its not because I have everything figured out -- it's just that for the first time, I finally feel like I'm pointed in the right direction. (It doesn't matter if it takes me the rest of my life, the point is that I smile after every step)

I'm happy. I laugh so easy now. It's nice.

[even-fools-are-right-sometimes]

I wanted to say i love you like an accident, like it just slipped out my mouth, like bars of soap, like youth. Anything so I could pretend it wasn't on purpose, wasn't carefully scripted and rehearsed, everything weighed on the great scales -- my dignity against the shape of your lips around my name, my heart against the exact temperature of the sheets between us.

There was always this core of me that thought you would treat me more gently, might not realized how the distance from my thoughts to your ears has consumed me, if it seemed to surprise me too. As if the practiced spontaneity might convince you I said it without thinking, and that might protect me.

I've never done anything without thinking about it.

[even-fools-are-right-sometimes]

We spend so much time apart now. Not on purpose, only the threads of our lives are building different cloths and its so hard to find my way back to you when the places we belong together aren’t home anymore. I miss you with this kind of backward ache, I miss you and I miss our younger selves that didn’t know what it was like to be separated. I miss being knotted to you, so close that it must have been fate that bound us together.

It’s just so hard to tie you back into my life with all this distance between us. Every time I see you I worry. Worry that this time it won’t work, that in the months apart we’ve changed too much to fit together like we should. And I know you laugh when I say it scares me, but oh god it does. I don’t want to imagine the tapestry of my life without you in it.

But maybe that’s why it will be alright. I’d drop a hundred stitches to loop you in. I’d let the whole thing tangle to keep us tied. Maybe as long as we keep making knots we’ll never come unraveled.

[even-fools-are-right-sometimes]

we dissected salamanders in class today. did you know the eggs have to travel half way up their abdomen, loose in their belly, to get from the ovary to the oviduct?

he holds me close and calls me his little monster because of how much this (me and him, him and me, us) scares him. it scares me too

i'm flaying back pieces of skin, offering him slivers like organs like facts about how salamanders mix their oxygen-rich blood with their oxygen-poor blood and its inefficient but its alright because they can breathe through their skin

and he keeps taking them gently and smiling and is slowly fitting them together like something worth cherishing and it should hurt but it doesn't. its never been so fucking easy to peel back a tangle of veins and give them away.

i'm crazy, this has got to be crazy, he's interlocking our bones with every word and every touch and i want it but i'm terrified. the ribs on a salamander don't surround anything, but if this doesn't work its going to take breaking all of mine to remove him from where he's grafted himself into my chest

salamanders lose their gills when they move onto land. they don't ever get them back. do they realize as it happens how much is changing?its not that i want to stay in the water, but what if once i leave its too late to come back. the call of void equally opposed by the fear of the unknown

it's good, somehow its so good but i keep anticipating my scalpel to hit rotten flesh (is it pessimism or prophesy) listen to your gut, but mine only trembles (is it warning or anticipation)

i don't know what i'm doing, peeling back muscle and viscera to say here is my heart, fragile as a liver

after this is free fall

[even-fools-are-right-sometimes]

I introduce you as my best friend, always, soft like a child after all this time. I say best friend like some people say husband, like these words are a promise and this promise is my defense against the world (like knowing that I have you is enough to make all the rest bearable).

There are no rings for something like this, so we pass the words back forth like a vow, an endless repetition of this is my best friend and my best friend said and she is my best friend, over and over like an oath, like a call and response where I ask still? and you say yes and no other words are needed.

[even-fools-are-right-sometimes]

1. Do you know how pearls form? It’s like a splinter for an oyster, an irritant slipping inside and being wrapped gently, incessantly in smoothness. Bundling up the pain until its soft and shiny and doesn’t hurt anymore.

2. I broke up with him on a Saturday. I didn’t tell anyone until Monday and in those liminal hours in-between I wrapped myself in three blankets and watched competitive baking shows for hours on end. I didn’t want to tell anyone because that would make it real. I didn’t want to say anything until I could tell the whole story without crying. (I couldn’t bear being seen until I could stand under the weight of it all)

3. My grandparents bought me a pearl oyster for Christmas when I was eleven. We cracked it open in my great-grandmother’s kitchen right after presents and I watched, too young to hold the knife, as my grandpa broke the shell open and pried out my prize.

4. I never learned how to swallow pain, only how to hold it in my mouth, rolling it around on my tongue like a terrible mint, unable to stop myself from tasting it, unable to speak around the heaviness.

5. I still have it all these years later. When I was younger, I would slip it from its little necklace cage and roll it around in my mouth. I’m not sure I can explain why I did it. Perhaps I just liked the feel of it. Or maybe I had the strange desire to take this paradoxical treasure inside myself. The irritant and the reward. Maybe it was practice for all the pain that would come later

6. Perhaps someday, someone will take a knife to the hinge of my shell and pry this ball of pain from behind my teeth. Perhaps I will thank them

[even-fools-are-right-sometimes]

xiix. green sky - 8.19.22 @nosebleedclub

The sky has a green cast to it, the kind you can’t really unlearn if you grew up around cornfields. It settles in my bones -- equal parts warning and siren song, a violent sort of relief.

i could destroy you it says, and suddenly it is an act of rebellion to stare at the sky, to stand like a tree in the path of the oncoming storm. Or perhaps not like a tree, because a tree never had any choice in the matter.

When I was a child, we would hide in the basement, listening to the rise and fall of the sirens past the rattling of the house and in my head I would picture climbing back up the stairs to a find a world unrecognizable to me, irrevocably altered by a little bit of wind.

look at me, it says, look at me and be afraid.

There is something humbling about tornadoes. Here there was a building, now there is rubble. Here there was a life, now there is only what remains after complete annihilation. Something cleansing, like rain if rain had the power of the entire ocean behind it. Not a rinse but a rebirth.

Still there is something so tempting. I will destroy you. I will break you down and scatter you apart it says, and in the wreckage, only the foundation will remain.

Sturdy, wiped clean, ready to start again