I wanted to write about something substantial like climate anxiety or genocide. I think to write about those things properly and in a heartfelt way, you must have a repertoire of trauma in relation to said topic.
But then I keep coming back to: his hands, building a table. I’m thinking about how he’s going to rent a U-Haul to pick up pounds and pounds of lumber in order to make a sculpture. I’m thinking about him using his hands, about him using his hands on me like I’m a birch or an oak and I’m dripping resin and oozing moss. When he’s using his hands on me, it’s like I’m being built, or forged, or shaped.
I’m thinking about how beautiful Cambridge is, beautiful in a quiet and pleasant way. I’d like to show him Newton’s tree, and the Mathematical Bridge, and Orgasm Bridge, and all the bridges and all the trees. I want to show him every nook and cranny, both in the town and on my body.
I’m thinking about Lonely Girl Phenomenology (Kraus). Is this my natural form? Desperate, wild, teary-eyed, wide-eyed, vagina-wide open… Sex with other people while loving him feels more intentional, it feels intentional when I superimpose him onto someone else, sliding in and I’m cognizant of my own pleading, gaping hole…
Loving him is sort of tragic because I wish I was better. I feel so ill all the time, assigning myself all these ailments and broken bones. The tragedy is I’ve never broken a bone. But still: walking around with a cast all self-righteous, draining pity from every straggler. I hope he never watches me sleep—snoring, eyes open, ugly in all the worst ways.
I found poetry through a blog post that I read in eighth grade. Someone had reposted a Frances Leviston poem called “Humbles,” and I couldn’t stop reading it. Something about the visceral portrayal of pain in that poem was so contrary to what I’d been accustomed to—pain with a bowtie, pain neatly bundled up, pain on a platter: digestible, palatable. In “Humbles,” Leviston describes a dead deer hit on the road at dusk: “flesh’s pink, mauve, arterial red.” I felt I was being described in an acute and almost rude way. I felt prodded and dissected, and that’s how I often feel. But still: laying there, still, letting the poke and prod happen.
And then: I wish I had something better to give, some panting, living membrane. I’m a shuck, and I’ve been shucked open, and I’m sullen and sweating and soiled.
I just hope I bring joy. That’s all I can hope for.