Pain has been my teacher, but could love be my teacher too? Oh, it hurts but I’ll say it again: Pain has been my teacher, but could love be my teacher too? Relentless, the disappointment of expectations rendered to fatty string. Fruitless, yellow moon hanging limply from the vine. Telephone cables in the purple night. I look up and feel a churning in my chest like crying. Is forgiveness friend or foe? Based on how she feels inside me, I hardly know. Surrounded by black leather sandbags and broken wreaths of laurel, at the center of my soul, where she rests in the toilet bowl.
Truth was not able to set me free, so will fantasy work instead? I cannot make the right turn—foot across the body, scraping the floor—without trembling. (I pray that Alvin doesn’t notice but he meets my eyes and I see that he does.) The next time I try it, I hold my face in my hands and I say: Your body is a pillar of iron, you cannot falter because it is not in your nature. Then, when I make the turn, I do not fall. Oh, shock of faith, a psalm dutifully read though not even fully believed. Sashimi in the display case, red fish blood pooled at the green plastic corners. Remix me, run to me. To think that the scene of the crime is also a place of light.
I have always been a problem but I did not realize I could be my own solution. I took myself for what I was for so long that I forgot I could be something else entirely. I am closer to the Great than he was to the pyramids, but I cannot know if I am closer to my death than to my birth. History in the amniotic fluid, the future, the gilled girl in its belly. When my name came out bare, neither of us flinched. (Now I realize that every lesson pain taught me, love would have willingly taught me three times over—)
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