today I am wearing your shirt.

it is hidden beneath a thick, bulky sweater
because I need something you to hold on to, to physically feel.
I feel this inane need to protect it from the gaze of strangers
who wouldn't even know it was yours,
who wouldn't know your shirt
from my shirt
from any old shirt anywhere
and who wouldn't care.

it is hot today,
unseasonably so,
and I am buried in this mammoth sweater,
sweating, for
no
fucking
reason,
waiting in a frenzied haze of shallow breathing
and racing thoughts
for a response, any response,
to the fragile, pathetic little message my fingers sent before my brain could intervene that asked
quietly,
meagerly,
pitifully
are you going to break up with me?

my brand of feminism is riddled with misogyny

everything is laughter and foreplay until i suddenly remember how much i hate the way my voice sounds
and my fucking laugh
and i want to get my chin reshaped
and my nose
and i have split ends
and i need collagen in my top lip
and just as i'm thinking that i hate my body
you tell me i'm beautiful.
i try to smile but i mostly just wince
and i know
what a privilege it is
to look in the mirror and see the only thing standing in my way
and whine about it in my blog.

on April 20th it said: tell us about the last person who hurt you

And where shall I begin?
With the cruelty of his grin or the anger in his elbows?
Or our hundred million sorrows?
The faults that weigh his shoulders down?

Or tell you where my mind is now -
the sweetness in his lying eyes,
the painful gaps between troubled sighs,
the guilty gasps between her thighs,
the dissonance of our demise.

My mind constructs our arguments,
reiterates the same laments, retaliates with force enough
to block out our destructive love.

this convoluted elementary school history lesson riddled with inaccuracies brought to you by Bravo

the alarm took me by surprise at two o'clock this morning,
interrupting the utter silence with the way it howled through the town,
slow and sad and warning.
I wondered what it sounded like 100 years ago
when British soldiers burned my sleepy little village to the ground,
and I could see men crawling in through the windows
and pulling us out by our hair, me and my sleeping mother, to set our lives on fire.
though I'm sure that isn't how it happened,
it felt real
until the alarm stopped
and I started thinking again about the episode of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills I had just watched
and what a bitch that Lisa Vanderpump is.

in which everything is perfect except for one thing

the way you purposely do things just to make me laugh
and extol the virtues of my features
every time I get sad
and you take me to the zoo on my birthday
(because I fucking hate my birthday, but I fucking love the zoo)
and you take me out so I can finally wear that ruffly nude dress that was too short for my cousin's wedding
and you put on a tie
(even though you'd prefer to just keep your tee shirt on)
and when I collapse into bed,
you take me by the hand and turn on Billie Holiday singing "The Very Thought of You"
and dance around the room
and we stay up all night
until 4:00am when we stumble out to my car
and drive and drive and drive
and finally stop
and I have to pull away without you.

what it takes (i guess)

not the death of two (younger) siblings;
the first a 23 year old sister struck by a car on her nightly run,
the second a brother in his 50s,
who came home from work
to take a nap on the couch
and lose his battle with lung cancer,
leaving his wife with three growing sons and no means to pay the bills,
or the death of both parents:
the sudden diagnosis and the rapid way it took her mother,
the lengthy decline of her father who held on to the bitter end,
keeping his grandchildren awake in fits of giggles with his loud, middle-of-the-night singing
and other equally amusing side effects of senility.
nor 30-odd years of struggling to pay the bills,
while feeding and clothing and raising six (SIX!) daughters
on the income of an exhausted, overworked husband.

no, no
it was my sister,
23 and fickle,
breaking up with her Catholic boyfriend of four years without a care in the world
to drive across the country with a 20 year old redhead
some punk kid she met in a bar
that at last drove my stoic martyr -- i mean mother -- to tears
that she was not too ashamed to silently bury into her pillow
and then deny afterwards.

we met at a wedding

and spent the night in drunken conversation.
we were both nursing broken hearts,
finishing summers spent wallowing in the senselessness of loving the disloyal.
you laughed at my clumsy youth through the haze of vodka tonics
while i wondered if you'd kiss me.

months and months and months of
s l o w l y
getting to know each other,
trading secrets and ideas
while i pretended not to notice
you pretending not to notice
that i had purposely unbuttoned my shirt.

fastforwardto:

four in the morning
when you whisper my name so quietly that i wonder if you're hoping i'm asleep,
and my response comes out so urgently it sounds as if i was afraid it would get stuck in my throat.
you inhale
and everything but my heart stops,
fixes in place for years
until you speak.

"i love you."


the world picks up again, only now
there is no one in it but you.