I never experienced heartache passively, it always dragged me into a state of exertion, animating my mobility. I survived so much that I didn’t even remember. I was given the gift of bouncing back. The skill of regeneration. The Irish Curse. My dad said that if I fell in a river I would come up holding two fish.
You took me down through tunnels of your eyes and I never emerged. Your eyes were entire oceans, alien terrains of underwater creatures, and sometimes they looked like billows of smoke, and when you were sad they melted into pools of whisky. You stuck a cord through my stomach and it felt like hundreds of roots silently drinking me away, gulp by gulp, usurping every thought and feeling I had and consuming it with malice .In the tunnels of your eyes I held my breath, and made wishes that never came true. I don't know how many bargains I made with god to keep you safe. I don't know how many bargains I made with the goddess to keep you tender. None of them worked. I did rituals to rid myself of you, a cyclical madness, my memory plays tricks and paints it all canary yellow. Adds a poreless filter to this personal hell of my own design.
You took me down the tunnels of your blue portals, and spat me back out. Mutilated me with your mind, until I was unrecognizable. Poisoned the secret wavelengths of psychic language that we had built, sent radiation through our private airwaves.
I hold my breath in the same way when I pass by your street. Like I'm going through a tunnel.
I can still summon you in my sleep with sudden spasms . My psychic antennae go off and flicker like violent lights. I feel your heat pulsating over me, your eyes scanning my pale skin. The last time you were in my room, I wanted you to kick off your shoes and spread me out, translucent, across the blush sea of my velvet bed. Instead you scanned my room for half an hour looking for clues. I can hear you thinking, how serious was it? Has he been here?
You lie and say you don't care and I feel it clog the airwaves between us more and more. I kept asking you where it hurt, when it was me that was hurt, collected like a commodity, rented but never owned. I don’t know where or when our spirits converged and ingested each other, but they did, and it was horrific. Our bodies clung together like warriors trying to battle the pain out of one another. Engaging in that game is a luxury that time has stolen.
My grief was quiet and discreet, the itching of an unhealed wound. dripping down my arm with a silent rhythm. It had me kissing married men with nymphal volatility. My despair and rage ran rampant, cast out nets and drove them wild with wicked enchantment, haunted by their greedy hands and fevered eyes. I wanted to be eaten alive, swallowed whole. I wanted to be vulgarised, humiliated, twirling like moon snakes through high grass and wet craves. Seduced into amnesia. Falling into a forest of hands. Wide-eyed and eager for night-cold envelopment. Eager to find the thread between freedom and death in a strangers orgasm.
I never acted on these impulses, I just stayed home and wrote about them, assured by my imagination that in another dimension I was doing it anyway. I liked my secrecy, it kept me intimate with myself.
The earth took me back with her proudest of mountains, she took me back so forgivingly, so largely. She let me weep and ooze and scream and bleed all over her. She always does. I have crow feathers and I fan my skin and thank it for regaining its elasticity. Sometimes I want to be made of silicone. I was given the gift of bouncing back, an elastic soul.