Persephone Plummeting

At birth I was a miracle.
As tight as the umbilical cord was, I should have suffocated hours, if not days, before.
The little miracle baby, here with her creepy green eyes and mess of black hair,
Brought into the world to save something else that was already suffocating.  

At six I was a grown up.
The nights that mommy was crying
Daddy was drunk,
My sister was missing,
And I put myself to bed,
I couldn’t understand what was going on, but I knew that for once,
I was the stable one.

At seven I was broken,
Because if I fell and needed help,
They stopped fighting.
Lots of broken tail bones later they stopped helping and kept up the fighting.

By nine I was dying.
Not medically, but I was trying my best.
I didn’t want anyone to care anymore,
I just wanted them to go away and let me
Disappear.  

By thirteen I was fuming.
Nothing but hatred and anger came out of me.
At me.
I hated my life, so I hated myself because who else could I blame?

Sixteen was spent wasting away.
If I could move through this world lighter and prettier maybe it would be easier.
But it was never easier, it was a constant work out.
I never learned to stop fighting because it made it hurt so much less than to slow down and feel the pain;
To figure out where the pain was oozing from.

At eighteen I drove everyone crazy.
And I don’t even remember.
I look back now and I wonder when it was I stop trying to kill myself and get myself killed instead.
Nothing scared me because nothing hurt anymore.

By twenty three I quit.
After years spent feigning normalcy I couldn’t do it anymore.
I cross my legs and get bruises from it, because I think food is beneath me.
Or maybe I am beneath food.
I can’t tell where I stand anymore.
All I can tell is that I don’t want to be a miracle,
I don’t want to be an adult,
I don’t want to be broken, or dying, or fuming, or anything else.
I just don’t want to be, because the butterfly in reverse is me.

I never understood until you.
I couldn’t fathom why people wanted to spend nights together. 
It used to always be a race to get out unscathed before the sun showed up;
Extricate before everyone involved sobered up and
I had to pretend I hadn’t just used them
Or been used.
I never had the urge to be the last and first thing seen,
To bridge the gap between the p.m. and the a.m.
Then it clicked.
Slowly,
Because that’s how things work with me when I don’t want to admit to them, but
Suddenly I find myself wondering about your sleepy sounds,
The peaceful repose before the senses are in full swing.
I wonder how easily we’d find a comfortable position to sleep while staying entwined.
Who would be the first to fall asleep mid-sentence,
Would there be sleep at all?
And not once in all this wondering did I think about sex.
That’s how I knew.
It didn’t take long for that one to click.
Trouble.
And I understood it all.

You were the first green eyes I ever loved.
The second person I consciously looked at and claimed as mine,
Before we even spoke.
You knew me through all the bullshit on both sides,
You were the first to speak “soul mates.”
I didn’t fully buy into it, but it felt like something new, so
I took it up with enthusiasm.
And God how I loved you.
I loved you across the years,
Across the screaming,
Through my self destruction,
And far across all the miles.
I loved you desperately and stubbornly.
I loved you when you were no longer mine;
Kept you kicking and screaming
Into a cage of friendliness. 
Then you said you loved me again,
Or not again, but still.
Allegedly. 
I broke myself for you, again, and over, and one time more,
For old time’s sake.
You threw me just enough fragments
To keep me.

Then I was finally full.
Full of your bullshit,
Your condescension.
I couldn’t look at those eyes anymore.
I didn’t recognize you as someone I bent for,
Someone worth redeeming.
I couldn’t look at myself,
After all I did in the name of you.
All the hopes I hung on that slow, crooked smile.

I sucked the poison out,
Severed that red string that I worked so hard to weave,
And spat in the face of Aristophanes’ story;
But short of amnesia, I can’t get rid of you.
These are the last words from me you’ll get,
And they are still more than you deserve.
From time to time though, my thoughts will find you.
I will wonder what you’re saying about me now,
After receiving the words preceding these.
I’d like to hear the hate you’re spewing,
The secrets about me you’re spilling.
More than that,
I’d like to know if for once in your life there’s actually some conviction behind your words.
Weeks from now, I want a song to sound like me.
Months from now, I want an empty feeling where I used to be.
Years from now, I hope a face that rings familiar haunts you in a crowd.
But these are things I’ll never know,
I’d have no way to.
It would never make a difference,
I wouldn’t assume that my absence could soften you,
After all, my presence never did.

I used to write, all the time. 
I had a spiral notebook for the cryptic words, and a journal for the all too honest words.  I skipped homework and note taking in lieu of expressing things I couldn’t say plainly. 
Everything was so raw, and on the surface
I had to just get it out, get it down on paper, make it sound less awful with words.
Words were my out, my savior, my escape to something that I could master.

Now I wonder when I lost that. 
When the words left me, or maybe I left them.
I just dulled myself to emotion so much that I couldn’t access it to express it.
Whenever anyone read my words I was just bombarded with questions anyways.
“Who is that about?” “What about me?”  “Why that word?” 
Who, what, where, why.
I just write the experience, not the explanation, please stop asking me.

After all the dulling, all the burying, and all the hiding,
I cannot bear to have my feelings in the open,
Even if the open is only the closed pages of a book. 
To be so exposed after a so much time mastering, of
Taming the wild impulse to just spill my feelings out in ink.
Maybe it will free me,
But what if it rips me open and I cannot stop?

I would risk it though,
I would risk being smothered in the avalanche if it meant
I felt so intensely again.
I would take the heartbreak,
The stolen smiles,
The secret pain,
The loneliness,
I would welcome it all back
If it meant I could have my words back.  

“This one was meant for you.”
You handed me the fortune from the cookie,
Beautiful things await you.

I put it on my mirror next to the picture of us
And neither has moved since.

Weeks later you wordlessly left me.
I got the letter after they had already begun to brainwash you.
Okay, no big deal, I could wait four years.

Neither of us could have known,
The only thing waiting for you
Was a scared fifteen year old with a gun,
Doing what he had been brainwashed to do.

I would never forgive you for leaving me.
I could have kept you safe.
Screw the beautiful things; I was waiting for you here,
And you just left.

When you came back it was in a box.
I couldn’t even see your face.
That perfect creation that I loved to kiss was cold,
I would never even get a last kiss because there was about six inches of wood in my way.

All I can ever do is wonder if I was the last one to cross your mind—
If I ever crossed your mind at all.
A million times over I have imagined what your last words to me would be.
I have decided the last words you handed to me will have to do;
Beautiful things await you.

It’s easier to use other people’s words in place of my own,
Except they don’t quite fit the experience, because mine isn’t there’s.
But I can’t quite give shape to things.
There aren’t words succinct enough to explain the sharp and crumpling feeling that rejection of my touch brings.
I cannot accurately explain that I am so angry all the time.
I am so furious at my own powerlessness, and my own ineptitude of expression that I want to explode.
The anger hides the fear, the fear that makes me stutter and stammer. 
The fear that makes my tongue heavier than thousands of shackles.
I am not aware of a language in the world that has words for the hole that is growing in me,
For the emptiness that is festering where a heart used to reside. 
It’s not socially acceptable for me to scream incoherently,
So I am trapped.
I am stuck by my own limitations,
The fact I can not articulate and translate.
My very own super power, the power of verbal assignation,
Of painting a picture made of letters and punctuation,
Is building me a gilded cage.
My words are my weight that no one waits for.
My sweet cage of pseudo intelligence that talks and talks and talks, but
I never say anything that means anything to anyone,
Not even me.

A small world brought you back to me,
The you of now, so not my you.
It happened once before, and I got a little lost in the moment.  I tried to say hello, to remind you. 
You didn’t want to be reminded. 
Time is strange like that. 
You were strange like that.
You were strange in away that made me love you.

I didn’t really love you, because honestly, I was a kid.
I still had braces and only used semi-permanent dye.
I was reaching for sunlight.
What the fuck did I know?
You were a college man.
You had scholarships and a whole life that I couldn’t even pretend to imagine.
You were radiant.
What the fuck were you doing?

Did I mention you were dating my sister’s best friend, who was also mine? 
That’s a pretty important detail, it should probably be told.

It should be told that you pursued.
You sweetly asked for me to my mother’s face,
Then you took me to your room and you set standards for men to come.
It should be told that you are not good at carrying guilt,
But excellent at shifting blame. 
You excel. 
Excellent.

I never told.  I couldn’t tell. 
I guess I didn’t know what to say.
No one would have heard anyways because everyone stopped speaking to me.
In a school like ours
Things like that spread like fire in a library. 
I could have talked to pictures of you in my locker, but the words that your girlfriend carved on the outside were not of the conversational variety.
Even my mom hated me for you. 
Quite the trick you played on all of them, and me.
I would have been impressed if I wasn’t incensed. 

So “fuck you” it went. 
There were volleys of lyrics, glances, and one really awkward dance for good measure.
And fuck you and your beautiful face a couple dozen more times.

The braces were off, the boobs were in, the hair was purple for good, and
I would never let you know that I cared, or that I ever did.
I felt you staring at graduation.  (Not mine, because in reality, I was still young.)
I had to leave and get out of there.
I didn’t even stay to see my sister get her diploma.
(She still wasn’t talking to me, so I doubt she knew or cared.)
Then the first words from you that weren’t some one else’s. 

You had me at “I’m surprised you didn’t burst into flames inside the church.”
I had you. 
You had,
I had,
We had.
Matching blue hair, games, clans, NIN, fans, a tattoo for me.  We had.

Then she tried to die, and you left again. 
I didn’t know. 
No goodbye, no explanation.
Only sudden absence.
There was nothing.

I never took you for the kind to fall for such emotional terrorism.
You did and I didn’t,
So I got to be the villain all over again.
You signed up for four years of death and murder.
Four years of long distance.
I clung to the news and was sick every time they read the names.
Everything about you made me sick.

Ten years later you’re alive.
You are free and you are married,
You’re obsessed with death.
How could you not be?
Turns out, I’m still a bitch.
At least to hear you tell it.
And I have.

I’m not a kid anymore.
You would know me to see me.
The blue hair would tell you, the tattoo would tell you,
The way that I don’t hate you anymore would tell you.
That’s all you’d ever know.
Because I could never tell you about the violence that I’ve seen too.
The ones that came after you,
The ones that just had your traits I was after.
And how in a way I blame you for them,
For the violence,
Because you taught me that’s just how it is.
That people leave even if you do it all right.
That I can be erased just by someone pretending and lying.

That’s really where the story ends.
You’re good at endings,
So I’m sure you’ll understand.
Except I’d like to know,
In this small world,
This world where you like to pretend I don’t exist,
How do you explain the missing years,
The locks of hair,
And the vitriol?
And how about that tattoo? 

That place made me nervous anyways.
Red walls so the blood won’t show.
It smelled like lavender and sickness
I was watching them from far away, right there in the door frame.
Something is so very wrong here.
They fought as a way of loving.
That place sucked the energy out of everything and everyone
And it wasn’t even on purpose, or so went the silent sentiment.
Clawing and crying for hours
I was standing there not wanting to intrude
Why did I want to be here in the first place?
The air was sick with stifled sobs and filtered tears.
Everything just hung around as a reminder
I borrowed all the smiles.
The scent of sandalwood and bruises was ingrained in the floorboards,
There was no breeze to carry it away for someone else to whiff.
Nothing leaves this place.  Nothing. 
Then he hit the wall.
It’s ironic they ended up like this
Everyone wants better than they have.
You were supposed to turn back there
They never manage to turn around.
He holds her protectively,
The tattered doorway frames their fragile silhouettes.

And now I want to be transparent.
I wish I hadn’t come.