Are people like this, are people like this, are people

something isn’t . . .

quite right, quite right, quite right

it doesn’t quite fit right (!)

generational mistakes

like the one his parents made

when they had sex that one night and

 

a month later when she didn’t bleed and

his mother looked at his father and

I guess I have to do this now?

her eyes asking questions

her hands rubbing her floral apron, her fingers coated in

flour, her head tipped back, the scream.

 

Are people like this, are people like him, when they

slip out in one push, so ready to make the world their own

so they fuck it up, they fuck it up,

they fuck everything,

because they think they were born

with the right to take whatever they want

as long as there’s a chance, just a

 

 

please! save me! my mother never!

my mother never . . .

 

 

 

he heard it one day

she said “I never wanted him anyways”

poor boy. poor boy. poor boy. gold hair. sad lips.

girls used to say to him, behind his back, around the corner, in notes folded up

like footballs, left in lockers

I think I can fix him.

I think I can fix him.

the words were said so many times that they made a coat

and he put the coat on

and he liked to laugh when he wore the coat

that the girls had made him.

 

 

Now that one thing his mother said walks

with it’s own feet, it’s own hands, it’s own dick

and he uses it like his own!

that thing his mother said, he is that, the thing

his mother said . . .

and he pours his milk into a cup

and he eats his cereal with his hands

because something about him will never be

quite right (!)

 

people are like this

people are like this

 

when they know their parents didn’t want them

when they see the sadness in their mothers eyes

when they separate their spirit from their body

and use their skin like an excuse to say they’re really alive.

The other day I was on the bus and I began to wonder what the world would be like if I was everyone and everyone else were me.

The bus stops. I stumble. I grab the rubber hand grip. The bus moves on.

I mean, I don’t want the whole world to be just like me, but what if our similarities are more than our differences? What if my worries, fears, concerns, self-doubt, self-contained excitement, hop-skip-and-a-jump glee is the exact same as that guy over there? What if my mind, literally my mind, my soul of souls, is in every single brain in the bus?

What if that guy over there is worrying about impressing his boss, just like I am? What if that girl in the priority seating broke her ankle because when I tripped the other day, she’s the version of me that fell?

Everything stops. Everything rotates. It spins and it spins and I hold onto the rubber hand grip again. What if I am everyone and everyone is me. What if we are all the same.

I want to reach out and say hello. I want to tell them it’s going to be okay. I want to look someone in the eyes. But they’re all looking down.

Just the same as me.

I woke up at 2am and googled acid reflux

because it felt, I guess, like my stomach

was eating itself alive looking for some comfort.

so,

I googled anxiety.

But I guess I already knew.

Sometimes the walls close in like a trash compactor

but it just crunches up all my good thoughts

eats away at my better senses.

I clicked off my phone and a scream came from

the street, you know

the kind of a scream that never lends itself

to sidewalks.

Why aren’t we all in the streets, screaming, clawing

digging at ourselves

oh,

the church bell rings.

I wish I could have held your brain in my hands

while it developed

I could have stuck my fingers in

to stretch sulci

and bend gyri

and pull out all the pieces

that made you such a

delusional

piece of shit.

I. I think about

My dad without her

Her voice. Still here.

II. Children adrift in history

screaming in the hallways

while we stare into space

and wonder how they got there.

III. We make snowball cookies

white sugar floating to the kitchen floor.

IV: The phone rings and we know

it couldn’t be anyone we want to talk to.

once a month things go red and

well, it could be, uterine lining

or it could be cardiac arrest

tissues stretching, pulling

myelin blinking brightly in the brain

I want to adopt the saddest, fattest, laziest, most unwanted, patchy, squeaky meowed, elderly, potentially diabetic cat you have ever seen.

I would call it Maury.

Maury sits in the window all day on his cushion thinking about the lives he used to have. Alice who fed him kibble. Charice who liked to dance to Beyonce in the shower. And the kid with no name who gave him a sad pat in the alleyway where I’d find him two days later.

Maury feels lucky for his cushion. Sometimes he thinks about pulling a paw out from beneath his belly to swat at a moth that wanders past, but he changes his mind. The moth makes its uncoordinated trip back to the corner of the blinds.

At the end of the evening we come home and Maury glances upwards at the sound of the keys jingling in the door. He looks down before we can see how much he cares that we’re home. Maury knows that love is a risky game so he shows us affection sparingly to keep us interested.

After dinner is made Maury rolls onto his back and gives a little mew. I drop some salmon skin in his mouth and he gives an accepting nod.

sometimes I have nightmares

about the smell of your hair dye

the gently pressed corners of your

pies – you never – used your own crusts –

but you called yourself betty homemaker with

a slightly maniacal laugh and

when you laughed you cried a little bit

on the inside

and the tears gently collected in the pit of your empty

starved for attention

belly

salty and sloshing back and forth

as you sway in your little

floral print,

hand-made

apron.

I was eight and in the bathtub splashing around with my floating toys. I was a child and an adult. I was tall but always too short. I had separated myself from those younger than me but still couldn’t see age as a process. I thought – I have aged. I have become. I am done. I am ready. And I splashed.

My parents would shout from the bedroom across the hall. To make sure I was alive. To make sure I was breathing. To make sure I hadn’t drowned, had a stroke, I don’t know. A baby stroke. A little kid bonking her head and bleeding out, bubbles going red and sticky. Always responding with a sullen yeah.

The bathtub was freedom. Quiet. A room to oneself. The bathtub was power. Cleanliness warmth. The bath was fun. It was an empty canvas for my imaginative scribbles. Barbies on the swim team. Catching the biggest fish. The plastic repair man plugging the small drain holes that my toes still deeply feared.

Our bathroom floor used to be linoleum I think. Whatever happened before the age of eight, whatever my life was back then, the state of our bathroom floor has not been retained. I do remember the living room carpet. A forest green, a mossy green, short a stout, kind of prickly, and patchy in places. The coffee table covering up the coffee stains, a trick I’ve stolen more than a decade later.

One day a man came in to the house. Put his toolbox down by the door on that green carpet. Walked to the bathroom. Going to install some new tile. They ripped up the laminate and knocked out the floor. Water damage, probably.

There it was. A light coming up from down below. The basement. The crawl space. The part of our house I’d never seen before but I was convinced so surely held all the secrets of homeowners before us. There must be dolls down there. Toys of some kind. I bet there is even a jungle gym. My parents probably wondered why I thought there might be toys buried beneath the soils of our crawl space and thinking of it now, I understand. Let’s hope no kids ever had been found down there.

I tip toed around the empty holes before he patched them up, fearing I’d fall in and never be recovered. The space under the house wasn’t a dreamscape now any more than the attic had been once I saw it filled with dust. It had shown itself to me for what it was. A place for different kinds of fantasies. Darker ones, dreary ones, ones I had no interested in at eight. I walked back into my room and shrugged onto the carpet and into a pile of myself.

My parents came into the room and told me I couldn’t play mermaid anymore. I rolled my eyes or sighed or held myself up a little higher and said I didn’t do that anymore. Why did they have to say that in front of the repair man. Now he would think I was a little kid. I didn’t play mermaid anymore. I just liked to splash the water. Splash it back, and forth, a slow swaying motion. So small back then. My feet didn’t even reach the end of the tub. The water would lift me up if it swayed me just right and it would rock me to sleep.

“Still alive in there?”

Toes rubbing up against the ceramic. A splash of water on the new tile that I cover with the mat. One lone bubble that shifts down my leg as I dry myself off.

It’s said that we cannot recall memories earlier than the age of 3 or 4, and anything this young is blurry, unreliable, or at the worst, a completely fabricated story our brain has crafted in order to fill in the missing pieces.

Sometimes someone comes along and says they have a perfectly preserved memory from the age of two and I wonder if they are pulling back some truly repressed shit, or if they’ve simply created this world for themselves and are the most psychopathic among us.

It is a blessing to forget those years. Pooping. Screaming. Crying. Confused. The sheer insanity of learning every single thing you see all at once. The neurons stretching out and bursting, breaking, plastic melting, your brain growing and on fire, exploding. And pooping. And screaming. and crying. But you don’t know why.

I don’t remember much from being little, just snapshots. I remember a mossy covered sidewalk. I remember a dog. I remember the smell of a house I was only in once in a city I couldn’t place if you asked me to try.

I always thought that consciousness is what makes us human, and alive, but what a strange consciousness it is. A passing kind of consciousness. A charging stage where we exist mostly just to boot up into our solid selves.

I wonder what the brain of an infant would do in my body. Right now. Sky and trees and cars and wind and dirt and the slightly sickening smell of tuna and day old creamer. A bee buzzes along the bush outside while I type. I wonder if I would absorb these things all at once, or one at a time. If my eyes rocking back and forth along like a scanner would present a picture that made sense on the other side. Or if, simply, i would be screaming, and crying, and pooping. Because life without experience is simply terrifying.