the first time you see him, he is outside of your car, and you jump, because it’s just the headlights on him, this man in perfect-white, with his pale face, in the total darkness. you are driving too quickly on a back road when this happens, and the vision of him standing on the side of the road, facing you, makes you check your review mirror, because – oh, you’re a child, aren’t you, but you’re alone, and he was looking.
he isn’t, you decide, the next morning, looking for you.
but you see him again, kind of, any time your headlights hit something big and white, and usually you are calm soon after – mailbox, you sigh, birch tree, broken signpost. you turn your music up because music feels like it can fill a car, the way backroads and dark woods feel they can empty it. you clench your jaw and press a little harder on the pedal but you walk yourself in baby steps back into normal.
sometimes you are in the car with people when you see him, but then you forget about it. sometimes you are not, and you do not forget, and then you are speeding, eyes flicking to that review mirror, knowing-but-not-knowing he will not be there. what will you do if he is there, after all, if he could follow you when you’re already twenty-over-the-speed-limit. and each time you glance you feel this tug in you, that primal fear of seeing him warring with the knifeblade need to prove you will not see him. because not seeing him means he is not there, probably, and not seeing him means he is not following you, probably.
once, just once, while you are laughing at something your friend said, your eyes catch white, and then, in the review, white-black, like a head turning to watch, to witness, to follow on. but you are speeding and life is real and your fears evaporate on the other end of a party. it was a mailbox, you think, even though you know you saw it move. or a tree, or a signpost.
there is nothing worse in your breastbone than the occasional whisper that one day, you will look, and he will be in the back seat, in his pure white clothing, just looking.
sometimes you go by white places and you have a mark for them, just in the way you must mark things, a small pin you tack. where the house-shell is, or the little fake lighthouse or that family’s stark garbage bins. these sometimes catch you, when you are foolish and late coming home, but you remind yourself more often than not. you see them in the day, when they are plump and normal, squat promises that the man does not follow you, because what is he if he could follow you. when you come around the bend, you warn yourself: it is not the man, probably. he is not here.
and sometimes, when you jump at just a bunch of balloons or a snowman or not him, not him, it couldn’t be, you ignore the fact that these things are gone in the morning. you swore that it was a broken white telephone pole, and your mind is playing tricks. there are no white telephone poles in your entire district. okay, you decide. you put it out of your mind, because nothing good ever comes of thinking of things like this. you only ever remember when you are alone again, and in the car, and you are raising your eyes to the mirror, hoping you don’t see him.
but you always look. because not knowing is worse, isn’t it.
Tag: p
like, you didn’t like my tv show. so i said, okay. i didn’t talk about it once you told me it was stupid and sort of immature. i stopped watching it after a while even though i actually liked it. but you were right, you know? it kind of was dumb and it kind of was immature. i liked the characters, was all.
okay. we never went to go see my favorite movie. i had to promise you sex before you agreed to see it illegally downloaded. we slept together four times before you actually went through with your promise. you kept pausing it to check if it was done yet.
i confessed that you didn’t like my writing to caroline in the form of a poem. she wrote at the bottom “dump him.” i thought about it. but who else is going to love me if i get rid of you, you know? you make me feel like i’m not an open road, i’m the entire broken system of infrastructure currently plaguing our nation. like being with me is taxing, see. aren’t i funny.
but i can’t bring myself to stop caring. maybe i have too many issues. bringing you shit i like just so you can shut me down. we’ve talked in circles about it so much i feel dizzy. you make me feel needy just because i’m trying to share my life with you. is it normal for a couple to be like this. to have one person just utterly unwilling to participate in the other person’s interests.
the other day some really cool things happened and i didn’t tell you. the other day i read a book and i loved it and i didn’t tell you. the other day i remade myself and needed you and tried a million new things and had a whole life and i’ll never tell you, because what if this is another thing you don’t have time for.
we go to another one of the concerts i don’t like but you do. we spend time doing your activities. i don’t ever want to do poetry in front of you. you’d just make me feel like i was making a mistake. you’d be the one in the audience i’d be doing it for and you wouldn’t be smiling. we go to places i don’t want to eat and see things i don’t want to see and pretend we are happy. you promised me so many times that you’d start trying that i have a secret drinking game.
we get home. you take off your clothes and we have sex i don’t love and then it’s over. we don’t talk about anything. i shove my stories under my tongue. you’re on your phone when i’m talking. you’re too tired to hear about work. i write a poem about how sex can’t fill the space where intimacy used to be. i send it to myself. you don’t look up. you don’t even realize i’m writing.
“I missed you,” you say. complain when i’m getting dressed but don’t ask me to stay. i wonder how you can miss me when what you know about me is shrinking. when all you know about me is my body. when the deepest parts of me are a black ocean and you’re not even buying a boat. you act often like i’m making this all up.
hi you won’t read this poem but if you do this is why i am falling out of love with you. hi you don’t care but let’s, for right now, pretend that you do.
she asks me what it’s like,
loving a woman when i, too, am a womanand she laughs,
which is the one who sits and watches tv while the other one cleans?she asks: how does your love work,
do you trade off who goes off with their friends while the other one stresses?but our love works like this:
she saw her favorite dessert in our fridgeand she waited until i came home
so that we could split it.
i want to be the personification of a cat’s loud purr. or how a dog’s tail will wag all the way up his body. i want to constantly have an aura the same color as when you catch something out of the air without trying. i want my words to have the texture of finding out someone made you cookies, or else the texture of when everyone in the car is singing and laughing. i want to be the living embodiment of a snow day, or else the exact dew point of when you tell a joke and it wins over the entire room. i want to be a person that feels effortless and positive to be around. somebody who rings the sun and she picks up. somebody who makes other people leave smiling. that’d be enough.
how to move on when you swear you cannot
i swore i could not. the emptiness ate, and ate, and ate,
until i was succumbed to it, and i was numb to it,
and it had nothing left to takeit is amazing how long rock bottom feels like home
like you can go further, somehow,
a grave feels like comfort,
like natural,like the skin side of fish
i ate it and still was devoured by itbut we move because we have no other corner to back into
and we move because it’s the way upand the good news is it hurts but one day it’s worth it
despite all and all and all, it’s worth it
because you worked yourself,
pleat after cinchbecause one day you’re sitting on six thousand completed works
and you say:i walked up the mountain
and boy, did it flinch
What’s the difference between love and obsession?
i asked my therapist this,
sitting on the edge of a couch, panicking,
because ocd means that you obsess about little things (if i defy the rules,
the world ends)and she says:
“you love him
enough
that your obsessions take a back seat”and i say, “but
does he?”and she says, “you love him
enough
that you talk about him in the depth of
a bad night, where everyone else would talk about
the white numbness that collides with your life:
you talk about him
because you want him to be happy
while you suffer.”and i say: i obsess easily. I want for normal things.
she says:
the sun obsesses about the earth, then.
no all love
is obsession.
Archive 