Fallout

How much of this can i blame on you? Where is the seam sewn that subtly separates your arm from my torso? It’s been years now. Maybe it’s been enough. when I said I was done, I was empty. I felt nothing. For the first few weeks I didn’t even miss you. I thought of you, but it didn’t make my heart feel like your hand was around it, squeezing it so my blood seeped out between your knuckles. I felt...okay. I always thought that in the end everything would be okay, and maybe that’s why I felt like I was ready to be done. Remember the flaw in your introversion? You always forgot that I keep breathing without you. I suppose it was one of our greatest common traits. I forgot that I keep breathing without you. What an awful surprise when I inhaled and you weren’t even there to see it. Sometimes I can’t remember why I do anything when you’re not there to see it. Sometimes I sing and I let my voice trail off because I know it cannot reach your ears, so what’s the point? Your opinion of me always dictated my self-esteem. I think you knew that. Maybe you took advantage of it because you were young. Sometimes I just think you’re evil. You watched your words sear like you were branding your disapproval into my skin. You watched my tender flesh smolder, as your sentiments sizzled like acid deep into my fat cells, my muscle, my vital tissues. I think that always made you come. Your sadistic sex seemed so natural at one point. I can’t remember why now. I wish I could. I fight the sleep because that’s when you come back. You come back and I’m four months pregnant in a giant garden where the babies live before we women let them suture into our wombs and grow human bodies there. You come back and I’m four months pregnant and you tell me you’re leaving. I’m four months pregnant and I can’t be helped. I can’t get out of me what you’ve embedded into my tender folds. You always do this. You always come inside of my fertile mind. You know damn well how pregnable my brain is. You knock my consciousness up. Tie me down with your synaptic seed. Then you leave me to raise these ideas on my own. You’re a deadbeat. Him. He should’ve stopped. Maybe I didn’t come right out and say it, but he knew what I was thinking. He knew what I meant when I pled with him. He knew his ignorance was cutting me a thousand times. Tiny cuts, but so many, such volume, it was nearly enough to kill me, to deafen my central nervous system. A thousand slivers all infected with white hot intolerance. A thousand slits he had to make, because that one I was born with controlled him so forcefully. He had to escape so badly, he didn’t realize I wasn’t trying to hold him captive in the first place. He left me desolate. I tried to stop him. I guess when he got far enough away to see things clearly he looked back at me and suddenly thought I was beautiful. It just wasn’t enough for me. Not once I’ve been left forlorn. Not once I’ve been told I’m damaged. Now I see myself how you did. Now you see me different, but my eyes are the same. I never feel beautiful when I’m with you. I feel old and desperate. I feel embarrassed still. I don’t know how to make these cuts close up. Part of me doesn’t want to, diamonds only sparkle if you cut them many times. I’m so injured, but if you hadn’t done this, I’d still be only a rock. It is so painful to shine. It is so scarring to hold value. Now. Now I am damaged. There are some similarities between you two. Your pride. Your cockiness. The way you crave my praises. I turned you over and over and found a hundred things to love about you within the first week of meeting you. You looked at one side of me and pushed me out of your arms. I will never forget that. I will never ask you to hold me again. I may wish you would, but I won’t ask it. I’ve a bit of pride myself. Secondly, the drugs. Everything that’s going on right now is only half real, the rest is the marijauna enhancing the great things and helping you forget the bad ones. Half of your love isn’t real. When you tell me how you care about me, I always deduct 50% automatically. Better safe than shattered. In the end one of us will be shattered. It’s just a matter of whether or not the other will pick up those pieces and carry them along until they find something to glue them back together with. I got shattered last time. He left my pieces, cursing me for being breakable. You are fools. I’m only breakable so that you may know you have the power to destroy someone. I’m only breakable to feed your pride. So that you may sleep soundly every night you don’t rip my soft little girl body to shreds, proud of your ignorant mercy. You fucking fools.

A Place to Catch Her Tears

I lifted the blue cup filled with milk and tried to sip. The opening covered half of my face so that the edge of the rim opposite my lips rested on the bridge of my nose. This was the border of a perfect painting. Da Vinci could not have laid paint thin enough to shine a light through that would hold the same incandescence as her skin. She glowed, polished each day with a thoughtful cloth of virtue. She was praying, mumbling in low tones, and I couldn’t tell if it was English or Aramayic. She called me her dakhel deenak, and I didn’t know what it meant, but when she said it my face got warm, like the sun itself had turned to look at me. I breathed into the cup. Nothing in the world smelled like Sitho’s blue cups.

I drove past the house, what would be described as quaint by pretentious, but politically correct types. The porch wasn’t screened in anymore, so I almost didn’t recognize it. In fact, it was not Sitho’s porch at all. At fourteen years old it’d take me two strides, with my thirty two inch legs, to span it. You have to understand, that porch was huge. So big, in fact, that ten years earlier I was afraid to stand at one netted wall by myself, even when my Sitho stood just at the other, telling me she was watching me with her mothers’ eyes. Not understanding the statement I always responded, “You’re mother is dead.” She’d smile, “I know.” I stared at that house and prayed to God she’d talk again.

I’ve been a caffeine addict since I was fourteen. That’s when I read about alzheimers being prevented by a cup of black coffee. I drink a pot by myself each morning now. It was around six o’clock when I got to Uncle John’s house and I hadn’t had a cup since noon. “Take some aspirin!” He always panicked when I felt any pain in my head. He had seen me at my worst, when I was in too much pain to dress myself. That was years ago but the pain still made him panic. “No, it’s just a caffeine migraine, Uncle John. Don’t you have any coffee?”

“I’ll make a pot! Sit down, honey!” His worry always made him raise his voice and I winced at his kindness. I sat down on the couch, next to the big pink armchair that rested right in the middle of the room. I reached over to the arm of the chair and took Sitho’s hand, the same size as my own. “Uncle John says I look like Judy Garland, Sitho. What do you think?” She looked at me with her mouth half open so I could count how many teeth she had left. Her brow furrowed and I knew that if she could still talk she’d be asking me who the hell I am. So I told her. “Who’s your first baby, Sitho? Is it John?” I always tried to trick her. I always hoped she’d catch me at it and shake her head. She nodded. “No he’s not! No he’s not, beautiful!” I talked to her like she was a baby, the way we all talk to her now. “No, no no! Is it Sharon?” I pretended I saw some click of recognition like a quick sparkle in her pupil. I nodded for her. “Yes, Sharon! Sharon is your first baby!” I didn’t need to make it this complicated, but I wanted her to make the connections. I rubbed my thumb over the skin on the back of her hand. Her skin was so smooth, like God had sewn together threads of milk and draped it over her. “Who came after Sharon?” I prompted her in my baby-talk sing-song voice. “Was it John?” Don’t nod. Please, don’t nod. She nodded. “Nooooo, silly!” I put my face close to hers and kissed her forehead, smudging the pencil Uncle John had drawn her eyebrows on with. “Is it Susan? Is Susan your second baby?” I could have sworn she nodded with more vigor, like I had sparked her memory. “And I’m Susan’s baby, aren’t I?”---“CLANG CLANG CLANG WENT THE TROLLEY!”---Judy Garland’s voice flooded the front room and Sitho looked at the TV. I had just lost her. Damn you, Garland! If I didn’t feel bad for you due to the child abuse you endured I’d hate you right now! “Coffee’s done. I’ll sit with Mama,” Uncle John took a wicker chair on the other side of Sitho and I got up and went into the kitchen. I wanted to run back into the front room. I wanted to scream and shake her and make her remember me! I wanted her gaping mouth and furrowed brow to contort into scalding tears of recognition! I opened the cupboard for a mug. Instead I took out a blue plastic cup with flowers etched on the side. I put the opening over my nose and mouth . . . and I just breathed.