11.16.2005

the bleeding rose

If I sit really still I’ll be okay If I sit really still I’ll be okay If I sit really still I’ll be okay If I sit really still I’ll be okay If I sit really still I’ll be okay If I sit really still I’ll be okay If I sit really still I’ll be okay If I sit really still I’ll be okay If I sit really still I’ll be okay If I sit really still I’ll be okay If I sit really still---
It is not possible.

My mind keeps shifting, shaking, moving: towards and away towards and away towards and away.

Zoom in. Aerial view.

There’s my heart on the ground. There’s the rest of my life.

The hunger rises and pounds at my temples.

Fruit smoothie at the T. Pineapple orange with a twist of lemon. I didn’t want the special, but he showed me the mangoes, “Brazilian, they’re not ripe.”

Cut to that summer day you were thirsty and cranky, like a baby. I teased you. I insisted on feeding you a smoothie. You were so glad and I, purely delighted. So sure I could take care of you. Give you my love, give you my sugar. Sweeten your life.

Tonight I got a smoothie to take care of myself. Two days ago, my friend had said, “But are you taking care of yourself?” And teasing: “...because, if you don’t, who’s gonna take care of you?” Making light of my existential heaviness, my feeling old at 29.

Have you ever been, she said, in a situation where a child argues with a parent, and the child says something really hurtful like ‘I hate you’ or ‘Get out of my life,’ then runs inside the room and shuts the door? And the parent might be hurt … but inside the child is really hoping that the parent will come in and hold him.

(An echo of your ‘I wish you had insisted on staying.’ It’s what you said later, about that night you’d told me to leave your apartment and never come back. I came back, remember?)

Yes, I said. It’s what we’ve been doing with each other.

She said, It doesn’t work so well in adult relationships. For some reason, adults ... will actually wonder if they’re truly wanted... and they ... will up the ante ... in more and more destructive ways.

Two children abandoned in fundamental ways. We want the same. But somehow can’t receive it.

I recoil in the quiet of my heart.

We lost each other as soon as we found each other: like a star, our love consumed itself in pure luminous fire. We can only make it out in retrospect: a trace of something past.

Too hot to last.

I’m still stunned, wordless, though I write. Nothing can describe how you fulfill so much of what I’ve wanted since I remember having memory.

Protect me from my nightmares. Feed me milk from your body. Help me avert small disasters. Soak me with your body day after day. Try forever and ever.
If only we didn’t have to try so hard.

I can only write down what I love about you.

What I don’t -- your hurtful words, your careless acts -- they flutter like knife-winged butterflies inside my belly. Maybe they will quiet down in your absence, later on.

But right now they flutter and I don’t have peace, only the quiet of loss, of having something torn from my gut:

A bleeding rose in the center of my belly, my love for you.

posted by fridasays @ 11/16/2005 05:55:00 PM   0 comments

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