last night’s freewrite
in the workshop I led at YCA before my feature, I asked the students to write something inspired by the poems “Things I Could Never Tell My Mother” and “Dangerous Subjects” — what the kids wrote were all much better than this nonsense that I scribbled, but I’m bored and I need to move my fingers over keys, so here it is
You don’t know my middle name
or my favorite food
the reason for my scars
my shades of brown and gold
You have never seen me cry
although you have
You have never seen me bleed
I never bled
You cannot recall my collarbone
the summer rain of my laughter
my birthday
the day of the week
we last touched
You don’t know the crookedness
of my middle fingers
which necklace is my favorite
my mother’s name
the color of my eyes in daylight
the drizzle of freckles
under my left eye
the teeth marks
under my right
You never asked my favorite book
never heard my favorite song
and only read the poems
you knew were about you
and on a mostly unrelated note
a slight purge
something about a cube and a horse in a desert or maybe i made up the part about the desert, i’m not sure. something about tumbleweed. something about the fingers that fall languidly through my hair then to my face then to the button of my jeans. i emit sounds walking against the arctic gusts that slice down michigan avenue. i talk to myself. against the stone of the cultural center i say things like “what is the matter with you kristiana.” i know how it is to be on the other side. aren’t we always on the other side? someone thinks about me, doodles ‘kristiana’ in the margins of textbooks, texts me “good morning,” someone remembers things i have said that i don’t remember i have said, someone is invested in the minutia of me and their existence barely registers. i know how it is to be on the other side. i wonder, hovering on the banks of annoyance, how they could not have so many other thoughts whizzing through their minds, as i do, that so many of them land upon me. and yet, then, i am the one. it’s an everpresence. it’s adolescent. it’s repellent. i trace the slope of cheek in notebooks. i doodle eyelashes in heavy black ink, cascading from the shadow cast by the brim of a hat. i recall the scents with arresting vividness. i yearn till i feel my bones will bust through my torso. i chide myself for the absurdity. i date other men. i am courted by many men. i ignore phone calls. i swallow with finality and do all the tidy reconciling things that grown ups must do. yes, this was that and that was then and this is now and there is no more. and there never was. don’t be ridiculous. don’t be 13. and i’m really good at that for a handful of days and then i hear a song or a horn or see the tipping gourd of the moon and its milky reflection on the ripples of lake michigan or then i see the sun bleeding hysterically into the horizon and i am convinced that something absolute was there, that beauty exists, that there was an aching beauty in the spaces between us, that proximity charged the air with goodness, and i can no longer blame it on the overzealous neurotransmitters of adolescence and i wonder if i can blame it on simply being a woman, and i know that i cannot.
so i code and decode and smash the rosetta stone and code again. i think haiku in the shower. i blame myself for what was taken. i delete the number from my phone, then congratulate myself for having it memorized. only women do this. it’s painfully ridiculous. (the feminists will have my throat — whatever, i’m venting) and aren’t you, kristiana, laying a mosaic with the tiniest shards of stained glass? could you even be inventing the colors? were the pieces ever really there? we have an embarrassing and unattractive habit of concocting transactions that exist almost entirely in our imaginations.
well, the urn is empty now. ashes smear the computer screen. purging complete. i know i will fill it up again. it is only a matter of moons. a matter of lakes. a matter of time.