yesnothankyou

Here's some different kinds of heartache I can name:
Sunset gone red and fevery, shattering in medias res. contact, forgetting. a perfect moment. a why not?
not all heartaches are bad.

I'm trying to leave the past behind. It just doesn't know how to let go of me.

“What’s happening in may?” The email from my local library reads.

The violet wildflowers start blooming. My daughter tries to blow them like how you can blow dandelions when they turn into those white orbs. I read that dandelion is French for lion’s tooth. Maybe everyone already knows that but I only just found out. I test out every flower she brings me, pretending to blow. She thinks this is hilarious so I don’t stop.

I take out my old typewriter for the first time in 8 years. I clean all the dust off, I test the keys, I wonder why the apostrophe won’t work right. It feels cinematic almost, the act of caring for it. I keep it in the guest room and think about it but can’t bring myself to use it. I guess there's something cloying about it. Some old thing I buried. I read a story that breaks my heart about two people who become friends on a Nintendo blog. I write a story about two women who fall in love right before one moves across the country. I still don’t touch the typewriter yet.

Dylan buys lots of apples. Pink ones, bright, they crunch between our teeth. We eat them with our knees pulled up to our chests. My hands get sticky.

I don’t sleep much. I have more strange dreams, write down the weird things people say to me in them. “It isn’t finished with you yet.” and “that color isn’t meant to exist, we’ll have to pay for that.” and  “the lights are about to go out but you can pretend they don’t.”

I get more mail from Clare. She writes a lyric to our favorite song on the envelope and I hold it up against the sky. I mean to send her a picture of it but forget. That sky was her, wasn’t it? My friends are different things, but Clare’s always the sky.

I bleach my hair. I tone it after and it turns blue-purple, pastel. The color of a pale bruise. I feel a little like an intruder in my own life. Not in a bad way, though. Billy sends me a picture of his bud light on the beach. Says, “Remembering that fucking awful honda civic from our past right now.” It reminds me of drinking warm coke on a shore.

I buy a new scanner. For the typewriter.

I think about getting a tattoo. I want it to be utterly meaningless. Everything always has some kind of meaning for me, god I’m exhausting. I keep trying to forgive myself for it.

My mom calls to ask if I remembered to eat. She tells me she’s writing more stories about her childhood. She sends one about catching the light from stained glass windows in her palm and her first confession. It's sad, makes my head swim. I want to read them all forever.

I play pop songs so loud, too loud. I dance in the kitchen with my daughter. I dance in the kitchen with my husband. I spin in a circle on the tile again and again and again. I’m one of those ballerinas in a music box. Those music boxes always make me cry. All these metaphors for my pinwheel heart, surging in the wind, plastic and gaudy. I’m dizzy with love. I write the first sentence of something on my typewriter. it's silly, but it feels nice.

The universe speaks sometimes, I forget and remember again. teeth peeking, a half-nervous gesture, a semicircle sun mostly obscured by clouds like a secret, and I start thinking I can see a new way of knowing things. Hopefulness muddles reality and I'm accommodating. I don't know if that's a weakness or an epiphany. I've still got time to learn.

There were cuts on the back of your hands from where they dragged along the stone ledge but you didn’t even feel it, I don't think. I slid off the half-wall and my shoes hit the dirt like a slap. a punctuation. Shifting the sequence. Said something like you have too many freckles. Not too many, but the lie felt great. Your mother used to count them, that's what you told me and I believed it because I liked believing you. I was so caught up at the time, prying my way between being somebody and nobody. You would tell me how everything was inevitable, how it was more fun than you’d think to just lean into the punch. You told the biggest lies and I knew. Flexed jaw, cracked jewel, wove me worlds anew. Always calling me from rooftops where I could hear people shouting just so you could tell me some made up story that you swore made you think of me. I don't think I ever told you much of anything, really. I was a collector. Never as cautious as I should have been about what I collected. Marcus warned me not to go looking for facts from someone who liked to bend them, which was good advice that I didn't listen to at all. The performance compelled me and I blossomed around it. Tell me about getting caught in the rain and I'd feel it lashing. Say a name I'd never heard before and it rattled, gilt edged and elegant, letters tilting in calligraphy. It was great until it wasn't. After you moved back, you said the worst thing about me was how I could detach and make the act seem ordinary and simple. The way someone might wash dishes. The way someone might bottle peaches. broken clocks, etc.

It was just so long ago, you know? Why even bother? Because it eludes me how anyone can give up looking at something that demanded their attention once. Run the loop again, find the verse and coda. You, calling me a bitch. Me, asking how can you tell? I wasn't joking, but it made you smile. Just like that, you weren't mad anymore. It was one of those times where I could really see you. I thought you might show me another secret and I wanted to let you. More inlayed gold, grandiloquent.

We talked awhile back. Can you believe one day we just grew up? I can and I can't. I remember the person I was and wonder where she is now. with all my other ghost stories, I guess. You had said you were thinking about me the day before, which was a lie, and I laughed like you knew I would. Fun and familiar. You called me that old name, the only name you ever called me, asking why we even liked that. In my defense, I've never felt like I had a choice in what appeals to me. There were questions I wanted to ask you but it felt better to let them go finally, let the light eat them up. I'll say it here though: I used to wonder what it meant when some of the meanest people I had ever known were mostly exceptionally kind to me.

I'm still trying to make sense of what happens with the things that are no longer assigned to who you are anymore. You used to think I did this kind of thing like admissions with motive, always forging absolution, and maybe sometimes you were right. if that's true then I have never known how to atone correctly. Not for me and not for anyone else. I think you were closer when you talked about leaning into the punch. I think this is just a show of hands. My revolving history of every story that happened to me. How we gave and we kept and we released when it was over, and isn't the releasing remarkable too? I absolve no one of anything. I'm bottling peaches. These are love letters for all the strangers who used to be me.

“Don't forgive me this time.”

“Ok, I won't.”

Then we both grinned.
The wind eddied and the moon grew, I think.
You could hear it. Motion and tenor. Like the semivowel gliding in the word you.

She says, "Wake up, it's time to go."

My eyes adjust to the sun and I'm in someone else's bed. I called him a friend but I don't know what he was, that word isn't so precise. He was kind enough to take the floor and now he's sitting with his knees up. Knuckles pressed to his cheekbone, a series of minor changes in expression that I can't pick out well enough because I'm focused on the ringing in my ears. Like fingertips tracing a crystal cup. Anything else is for me to contextualize later when I'm looking for evidence.

(Like this: You push me and I shove you back in a mostly empty parking lot. You provoked me and I was half-drunk off the feeling, smiling inadvertently. Gathering momentum, a tether snaps, and the flash is the only thing that could call me closer to whatever. The stars are leering and I can't shut up, you can't stop me. Every time you speak it sounds like a ricochet. You're that snake we saw beneath the oak tree, you're the supercell lightning we saw from the french door, cloud-to-ground. It's appealing. Cup my hands and catch fused glass, tell me thank you. This is a deconstruction. This is holy, opulent and neon.)

It's night again. We're on a patio, sticky in humidity. Smells like June and citronella. Their eyes fixed on a far-off bonfire but I'm tracking hand movements. She points to a crawling satellite and I'm a quick co-conspirator. I love her like something scenic, a thing to take in, it's the only way I could. I'm out of options. I don't know what she wants from me and I'm too busy to give it the right consideration. The world doesn't cohere for me, has me bent. Sometimes it almost does and I linger there until I wear it down back into nothing, mirrors and highways again, houselights fading. Charting where sounds overlap with actions, my mouth moving in silence, and the math is all wrong. I use my memory to decorate hollow places. Rigged numbers still add up somewhere, don't they? So it's a smile exchanged in a parlor where none of us belonged but especially not me, sideways honesty in an abandoned home on Parker's Chapel Road, laying on the hood of a car in Arizona and needing them to tell me what the moment was for them, the tone Patrick used when he said an otherwise kind sentence on his porch swing. I meant to love everything in words the way I didn't know how to outside of them. Still not sure if that's what I actually did.

Someone pulls my ear because I'm not paying attention. They're trying to come up with a new game to play. Like a joke, she tells me, "Let's close our eyes and forget our whole lives, like everything. Do you swear you'll do it?" I swore whatever she wanted me to. Four crescents in the heel of my palm, the teeth of mountains, the fat magnolias in the backyard I grew up in, a junk store full of tin and fabrics so indigo I thought I'd never know another color. I swear on each, who cares, how much worse or better can it get? I didn't want to fix her, anyway. I wanted to be another ruined thing. Skyscraper into a god, delirious, endings don't get to pull at my shirtsleeves if I haunt them first. I thought I was all of it. I was just a stranger.

The car’s still technically in motion when I swing the passenger door open, hop out and curve around, careening towards her, like I had already been doing for years, only now we were reclaiming the distance. She laughs when I barrel into her, arms wrapped around. “You just ran barefoot out of a moving car for me.” She’s not surprised though, there’s nothing surprising about that. She's glad for it. The sound is great, gets trapped in my hair. The boys finally park by the curb, climb out, and then we go eat cherry sugar cookies, all standing in her mother’s kitchen. We make fucked up poetry with magnet words on her fridge. Isn’t it funny how things can sometimes feel deliriously surreal and deeply normal, nearly unremarkable in their familiarity, all at once? That’s what it was like.

Her mom won’t let me and the boys sleep in the same room, which I think is hilarious. Doesn’t she know I’m already married to both of them? Doesn’t she know we spent a week sharing hotel beds and tents surrounded by mountains and stars and love and hate, all the things we were made with? Or a lifetime before that learning the catacombs in that tormenting little space between our chests? Whatever, they’re terrible to sleep with anyway. They move too much, some limb always digging into me and I can’t stand it. I just like what I know, and I know them better than anything. I can learn how to know other things, though.

So we sleep in her bed, too small for the both of us, but it doesn’t matter. We whisper terrible jokes in the dark and I’m laughing, I’m crying, what a fucking reprieve it is every time the world shows you another person who you can unfold around, who wants to do that with you. It always feels startling, sure that the each time you find such a thing will be the last. And even now, I talk to her and immediately see what we were when we first met: both of us jagged and gentle and trying to find a home in things that didn't know how to fit us. I meet her, and light strikes a prism. Beginnings blur with endings, keyed up and crowding me. It's hard to get close enough to tell it right. I'll keep trying. The next night, we climb a hill with a friend of hers who's in love with one of the boys. He lays his head in her friend's lap, and tells me we should get tattoos of those seven bright stars that help form the Great Bear. We never get them, but that asterism belonging to the great bear still means many things to me. Things about the staggering architecture of knowing people in ways which language remains unable to occupy. Deep, dark and true. Those seven dots flashing like morse code, hollering all the things I'll never know how to say.

We take off for colorado in the morning, and it’s the only time the boys let me ride in the backseat. I’m glad because it means I can cry where neither of them get to see. It wasn’t even that I was sad about leaving, not really, I'm always doing that. It was because there’s something so overwhelming about the sheerness of recognition, how each time I feel it, it dismantles me temporarily. Starts off slow, some storm rolling in, and then it bursts, thousands of chrysanthemum fireworks. A sky-cleaving wreckage, shattering and smelling of smoke. And I lift my jaw, I invite it.

A few years later, I write something about distance and closeness, like I always do, and how bridging the gap is such a houseless thing—yet nearly geometrically predetermined. And when you find a person who knows the way, it feels like muscle memory. like a midnight choir that sings just for you. Obliterating and sublime. Then some guy who wanted too much from me that I never knew how to give, didn’t even want him to have, wanted to tell him to leave me the fuck alone, shares it after I post it, and I want to level him for it. It was never his to touch.

You told me you were always looking for yourself in the things people said, and I loved that, because I was always doing that too. I made the clues bright and loud for you. When I close my eyes, it looks like your hair when you wear it down. I'm hotwiring a car for you, it's time to go, aren't you ready? I love you. Let’s keep looking. Let’s never stop.

“I’m out of my fuckin’ mind,” he sighs, and it’s true, he is. In my memories his hair is always long, too golden from the sun, but that’s not what it looks like anymore, not what it looks like here. He rolls his own cigarettes still, pinches it between his lips and smoke floods from just the corner. I think his hands are interesting. Tattooed and textured, weathered from years of farm work. He passes the brown bag to his brother, both their faces red already. A paper bag crinkling between rough fingers is one of those odd things engraved in the soft shore of my soul. Kalem takes a sip, smiling, ignoring him—says: “Billie-Jo, what did daddy do when Quickboy took off with him?” and when he says her name, he shoots it out his mouth, melts it together, some single slurring word. Both of them do that. She suppresses an eyeroll, but I think she’s having fun. “He said, call Johnny, tell him to get in the truck. We’ll try to cut ‘em off.” Joe barks a laugh, head tossed back, cigarette all ash. “How were they gonna stop a horse with their trucks? I thought that son of a bitch meant to kill me.” They did finally catch him though. None of them remember how. By the time they found him, he was on the other side of the bridge in Des Allemands, across the bayou. All Joe remembers is flying down highway 90 on an angry horse that his father forced him to ride, the trucks closing in, his uncle screaming cusswords. Then his mind blanks out. He wasn't even ten years old.

Later, Joe’s crying because he lost a bet over a Saints game. It was too much money, it always is. He’s already gone, and it’s a little fascinating how that can still happen since he’s been drinking as far back as he can remember. They all started drinking early; at every fish fry, their dad, grandfather, and great uncle Junkhead would let them take sips if they fetched their beers for them. The men would get drunk enough that pretty soon the sips turned into gulps, turned into whole cans filched. Joe calls this the only thing those men ever gave me. I’ve seen pictures of him as a kid and he’s almost never smiling. For a long time it doesn’t make sense to me, that’s not how I know him. Usually he’s performing, turning his horrors into legends, sentences melding, erratic. He talks like his mother from the marsh, only he speaks faster. Every other word is unintelligble and brackish like the water he comes from. There's a glittering intensity to it, still. Draws people in and it’s captivating, can't look away.

When he finally stops crying, he drinks more from his paper bag and tells another legend. His eyes are glass, faded blue. He looks like the man he was named after, but no one's ever called him that. Squinting through his haze, he talks about when him and my parrain, his best friend Kanupe, ran from the cops when they were fifteen. They booked it through all of Paradis, didn't even get caught. “We might have been the two dumbest motherfuckers, but we knew exactly where to go.” His voice surges with satisfaction. “Back then, we roamed.” They hid in a patch of swamp, down in the muck. He smiles that lopsided grin when he makes the memory a fable. Years later, my parrain recites this story too, but it goes differently. He says Joe cried when they got back to the house, heaving and dripping on the stoop. His dad wasn't home and the relief unhinged him. My mom watched them hug from the window, because they were the brothers they didn't get to have. That was the same year he had a seizure outside the church. Some CYO dance on Halloween, and Joe took something with his beer. Next thing she knew he was out on the lawn, convulsing. Her and Kanupe were dressed as wisemen, staring silently as they waited for the ambulance. Two kids in costumes, wearing fake beards, watching their hero come undone.

Kalem’s getting there, but it takes longer, he’s eighteen years behind. He starts another story. Billie-Jo, who's never called that except by her brothers, smirks just like they do. She doesn't drink anymore. Not after she left the bayou and all those ghosts. The rest of them don't know how to stop, it's the only thing they've got, and now when they smile it looks deranged, all that devotion and cruelty twisted together. That crushes her but she understands. She pulls a drag from her red—Cowboy killers they always scold her—and holds it in her lungs good and long before letting it go. The freckles that gather at her sharp cheekbones are faint and perfect. They're talking about their mom now, the time when Melinda was interrogating her, saying mama, you and nanny are never gonna die right? am I right? What she doesn’t say is that later, Joe told her if their daddy couldn’t kill her, nothing could. Instead, she talks about how nanny pined for Father Bane, that she had a framed photo of him on her nightstand. They both howl with laughter, loud and thick with a corrupted love that's only theirs to know. “Ain’t that a trip?”

My nanny’s house scared me, all that iron and red velvet. I liked the porch, though. She had a can crusher and I liked watching those pepsi cans crunch into disks. By the time I came around, Father Bane was long gone and so was the picture on her night stand. When she says my name, her voice warbles. There’s a dollhouse in the living room but she won’t let me play with it even though I didn’t ask. I walk the property instead, running my fingers along the chain link fence. The land stretches out for miles and I feel like the tiniest thing anyone could ever be. Kalem finds me and when I tell him about the dollhouse I start to cry, but I don’t know why, I didn’t want to play with it anyway. He hugs me, tells me he’ll buy me a thousand doll houses, and then we go spit in her garden.

Kalem lives with us for a summer when I’m in the fifth grade. He becomes friends with all the neighborhood boys. They play manhunt every evening and I beg them to let me play but they never do. They complain that Kalem would help me win, and he says they’re right. I watch from a rooftop instead, furious and jealous. I decide to forgive him at a crawfish boil, when all my cousins say I'm his favorite and Kalem doesn't disagree, just keeps peeling crawfish for me. He buys an old pickup, sky blue, and sometimes lets me ride in the bed, which I think is a gut-punch kind of joy, unparalleled. He has this Johnny Cash album and doesn't play anything besides Wayfaring stranger. I get so sick of it, the same song over and over, but it's the only song his daddy still sings sometimes. I've never heard my grandfather sing. I know that it's beautiful, though. I know, because they all get somber when they talk about it. The single part of him not too sharp to hold. One day, Kalem comes home with a black eye and scratches on his face. I sneak into his room that night and ask him what happened. “Aw, Ash. Sometimes I want to tell you everything, but you’re so little.” I don’t know what he means. He tries to explain, just can't figure out how. What I've learned is that when you're born into something ugly it's hard to leave it behind. I watch him play video games until I fall asleep. He moves back in with his dad when the summer’s over, and he’s never the same.

When I graduate high school, Joe and my parrain call me, but not Kalem because he’s in prison again. I sit on the back porch just listening to them both fighting to get a word in. Kuh, Kanupe says. I don’t know anyone besides my family who uses that word. “BJ’s gonna knock us out when she finds out the shit we tell her.” My uncle Joe says she punches real hard. That’s because she used to be the maddest person in the whole world. She’s not mad anymore, though. She smokes her same marlboros like she has forever, and her smile lines are the best thing I know. Her stories are sad and sometimes accidentally beautiful and she tells them easy, unafraid. She says some people can’t make it out of darkness, but some people can claw through. Out of spite, at first, and then out of love.