Category Archives: Prose

Said in the Silence

Life, loss, Prose

I. You’ll never know this, but in the car I always trace confessions against your skin in lazy circles, like

People carved their names into my bones when I gave them a home there.

and

It made me so weak I broke my spine and called it a sacrifice for love. Maybe sometimes people weren’t right for me but I still tried to save them from themselves. I think it may have broken more than a spine.

and

My armor is crumbling; you’re starting to settle in just under my skin and it’s scaring me because I don’t think I’ll ever mean to you what you would to me & I want to be wrong, but I don’t think I am.

Or, simply:

I want to be wrong.

II. Your head bobs to the music and fingers tap the wheel. I watch out of the corner of my eye and pretend I’m not fascinated by your habits. You reach over, graze my arm. You touch a scar you don’t know is there. My hand slips up your sleeve to keep my next confession more hidden.

I have more than skeletons in my closet. There are monsters that howl & ghosts that haunt me. Sometimes they get too loud – the door breaks open & I have to let it hurt & bleed in ink until they quiet and I can lay them to rest again.

and

Before I wrote on lined pages in notebooks I cut lines into my skin, but I’ve lived so many lives since then it seems like it was forever ago. Until it doesn’t.

You change the song and settle back again, your gaze skittering along my skin. Prickling. I know you’re taking in my measure, but it doesn’t bother me. I’ve already dissected the anatomy of every failure, every hard decision I’ve ever made, every time I felt like I wasn’t good enough for whatever reason.

I trail letters down your arm as I pull my hand back to me again.

Go ahead & try to read me. I’ve picked through my own history enough to feel like a scavenger. I won’t ever hide that my conscience is scarred enough to glow in the dark from all the old wounds.

III. We get to where we’re going. You park & I stare out the window like I wasn’t just watching you. I glance over when you don’t say anything and you quirk an eyebrow, reach over and squeeze my hand. I trace words into your palm, like

I hope I’m more than ego boost. I hope you see me the way you see stars at night, or good music. I hope you see me like my own kind of magic.

IV. I open my hand inside yours. The size difference is almost comical. I stretch my fingers against yours as far as they would go, then slide my hand until our fingertips touch. You watch & don’t say a word. I make little circles, and say things like

I think you’re going to hit me like a freight train and it’s going to hurt. I don’t know if I’m strong enough to take a hit like that anymore

and

I wish you’d give me somehing other than a ride, give me something from inside your head, do I even mean anything to you other than a way to kill some time because it’s not feeling like it.

V. I hop out and watch you leave. My fingers drift to my collarbone, where I can feel the bone under my skin. There are things I don’t even say out loud to myself.

Don‘t set yourself up like this. Don’t let him under your skin when you aren’t under his, don’t make a home for him in your bones when you’re already brittle. It doesn’t matter what he makes you want when you don’t make him want the same.

Don’t break your own heart. Stop while you’re only halfway to never going back.

and

Sometimes you can’t get people out from under your skin. Especially when you don’t want to.

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Respite 

Life, loss, Prose,

People want so desperately to wipe the slate clean, start over with no past. Like there’s no history clinging like a second skin, no memories playing repeat of past mistakes and regrets so powerful you can taste them on your tongue like icing.

I want to remember everything.

I want to remember all the times I ever felt alive with the people who are now dead. I want to remember crooked smiles that lit up the world like sunshine. 

I want to remember this vast world of infinite possibilities reduced to a moment, a piece of time where everything was perfect. 

But you can’t have all the good without the bad, the other moments where it felt like your soul was sliced down and made into glass. When you shattered and lost pieces. You may come back together, but you’ll never be the same because some were lost. Pieces were stolen. People were careless; people were so busy trying to collect their own pieces they didn’t realize they were crushing yours beneath their feet.

I want to remember those moments too.

When it tasted like blood in my mouth from trying not to beg and half-moons lined my palms from clenching my fists when I was just trying to hold myself together. All the times I tried not to cry, all the times I hated myself for looking weak. 

Because those moments are precious too. Those moments led to growth, even when the growing pains wormed into my bones and I couldn’t catch my breath.

Every moment has led to this one. This moment isn’t perfect, but I can see every strand, every decision (mine or not) that led to me being right here, right now. A person able to withstand. Survive. And smile.

Just a Little Bit of Prose

Life, loss, Prose

Just once I’d like to lay my head down and go to sleep. Sleep without the play play play pause play of constant loops in my head and all the conversations I never had with the people I should have burning in my throat.

I need to go to San Fransisco. I need to see my unbiological brother and sit by the ocean smoking cigarettes and listening to waves until we finally break down and start talking about all the ghosts that haunt us because he gets it. He gets how people are there and you watch them spiral down and no matter how hard you try to hold on you’re just left with splinters and bleeding onto pages. 

Because even though it hurts like hell to relive the worst moments in your life, sometimes it’s the only way to fall asleep and make room for dreams.

F is for Forgetting

Life, loss, Prose, ,

My father passed away ten years ago yesterday. I’m not much of a talker. I’m a writer by nature. I’m a bit random for a blogger. But I can write.

It’s how I’ve kept my sanity.

…………………….        ………………………

F is for Forgetting.

Forgetting the shake in the voice on the phone as I was told my dad was sick and going to the hospital, forgetting the frantic phone calls to my mother and brother trying to figure out what was happening, why in the world my dad would go to the hospital over being sick when he would barely go to the doctor for a broken bone.

Forgetting my sister-in-law’s panic as she realized I had no idea and had to break the news that he had been taken by ambulance and that he wasn’t breathing and had no heartbeat.

Forgetting the annoyance on the desk clerk’s face when I rushed in asking where he was and she said she had never heard of that patient and I needed to calm down.

I didn’t realize I’d beat the ambulance there since I was closer. I waited outside.

Forgetting them pulling my dad out of the ambulance, breathing bag over his face so I couldn’t really see it, but oh god, his arm. His arm was just hanging off the gurney and he would never do that.

Forgetting running back inside and flipping off the desk clerk who insisted that I WAIT and running to the back, yanking open curtains until I found them. Shirt cut open, cuts in his skin as they did I don’t even know what, he didn’t look right, they were shocking him and prodding him.

Mom. Where’s Mom?

Running back to the waiting room and taking her back to him, but they stopped us and had us go into a room to wait.

It was too quiet. There were too many tears and too much silence and nobody with any answers. Other people were coming and we had more to call to get Dad’s shift taking care of grandma covered.

Forgetting the doctor coming in and telling us what we already knew but didn’t want to admit and the cheerful nurse coming in right behind him to ask if we’d ever given organ donation a thought and how my dad would’ve felt about it.

Forget the itch under my skin to leave, forget the hugs and the crying and the keening noise I didn’t realize I was making as I cried.

Forget going outside. Forget how beautiful the day was, sun shining and birds singing. Forget how traitorous that was.

Forget waiting as his brothers and sisters came, breaking the news to them. Forget the disbelief, the grief.

Forget going back inside.

Forget the hospital letting us see his body, forget the tilt of his head and the way his mouth was just slightly open. Like it was when he snored. The way mom ran her hand down the side of his face, kissed his forehead.

Forget the ride to her house. It didn’t matter where we were. My mouth would still taste like pennies and my hands, I didn’t know what to with them.

Forget all of it.

I survived, even if pieces of me didn’t.