I got addicted to that taste, sugary sweet on my tongue. The flavor that comes with tracing the words “I love you” over and over with your lips. Sometimes I said it just to say it, just because it had been too long since I knew the taste. Just a quick whisper and it was back again. I love you. I love you. I love you. Honey. I needed that hit. I said the words constantly until my lips were chapped, my tongue felt fuzzy with them. And each bit of sweetness melded into the other until I barely noticed it. So I had to say them more. And I said them until the sweet turned to bitter and I choked on it in the back of my throat. I still heard myself mumbling those desperate I love you’s, wanting it to feel like the first time when I savored it. And then I couldn’t taste anything at all.
I like skin that has been tanned by the sun. That has seen so many bright days and been cured by salt from ocean breezes that it crinkles like nothing more than paper stretched over bones. I look at my own skin: pale, soft, translucent in some places where it reveals my vulnerabilities. This is young skin that hasn’t yet had time to be marred. It has none of the beauty, the delicateness of aged flesh. My little white scars, the lines on my palm, the spaces between my fingers are all empty. One day I hope I will not be so tender and blank and new. Let me be one of those people with worn skin and old hands you can take in your lap and read from them the story of their adventures, their heartbreaks, their triumphs, and their great loves for days on end, yet still end up feeling like there’s even more lurking beneath the surface that will always stay a closely kept secret.
She used to steep cinnamon sticks and citrus peels in a glass tea kettle on our rickety stove whose knobs were always coming loose. I remember how beautiful it looked to me, the brightly colored rinds floating in clear water. Sometimes she added a chrysanthemum from the window sill flower box, and those were the times when I would climb up on the counter and spend what seemed like hours staring at it, getting lost in it in the way only a child can. I got my first burn that way. I leaned in over the range and my elbow touched the edge of the hot burner. You can still see it. That white crescent moon, just there. I cried and she took care of it with soothing tones and gentle fingers, bandaging me up with such care and brushing the hair from my wet, teary eyes with a smile. That was the end of my counter-hopping days. At least when she was around, that is.
I got older and an apartment of my own. One of the first things I bought—even when the place was bare and I sat on the floor to watch television—was a glass tea kettle just like the one I had known so well as a child. As soon as my friend got the stove working, I tried my first brew. The ingredients were straight from memory: one cinnamon stick, whole cloves, orange and lemon peels. I waited eagerly for the scent to fill my little apartment. Maybe my hopes were too high. Maybe I had romanticized the smell too much from my childhood. Maybe the mix was wrong or maybe I had missed an ingredient, because it didn’t smell quite right. Good, to be sure. But it just wasn’t… the same. The first night of it brought disappointment. Consecutive nights were spent tinkering with it in any way I knew how, trying to get it to match the wonder of my memories. I spent weeks adding and taking away and repeating over and over again until finally I ended up back where I started with the same brew. I sat on the counter and stared at it while the scent permeated the kitchen again. I stared and stared as if trying to find my answer spelled out in its waters. I found myself starting to lean over to get a better whiff, and promptly pulled back, remembering the scar I had been left with from the same situation so many years ago.
And then I knew exactly what was missing. It would never be just right without her.
“You can’t trust me,” he said to me, fingers tracing up past the crease of my arm and to the bones of my shoulder. “I’m no good, really, and you will regret this one day. I was baptized in mud and anointed with blood. A little squirmy thing that nobody ever gave one shit about.” He kissed the words into the side of my neck, my throat, my collar bones, pressing them into my skin so they burned there and left a mark. “I will hurt you, because I hurt everyone. I don’t want to, but that’s how it goes. Put a shard of broken glass against your flesh, and it will cut you,” he said. He looked up at me just once, turning my face towards his with powerful fingers cupping my chin. “And I am sorry about this. I am so sorry, but I love you.”
When empty things break, they crash, they scream, they announce to the world that they are breaking. Yet, they have nothing to spill, nothing to lose and never be able to gather back together and fill themselves with again. Empty things know no true loss or pain. They cry out the loudest because they simply do not know better. But when full things break, they go with a soft plink, like a water droplet hitting glass. A quiet, mournful sound that never seems to match the wreckage left behind. You can miss it so easily until you accidentally step on a jagged broken piece and it slices you right open.
He kept me in a jar on a high shelf to collect dust and get bleached colorless by the sun’s rays. Or, that’s how it ended up. At first he took me out to look at me every day. He asked me to dance and I did and I kissed his fingertips and he smiled and he promised to see me again tomorrow. But as time passed, he forgot about me and I was just a part of his normal scenery. He passed by me every day like he didn’t even see that I was there. Sometimes I knocked on the glass to try and get his attention, but my small knuckles couldn’t make enough sound for him to notice. Eventually, I stopped trying and just watched as he walked by. Every now and then he would take me down when company came over and pointed out my presence. I danced on their palms and tugged teasingly on their fingers, hoping that if I performed well enough, they would let me out for good since I was no longer loved here. But all the others were just like him. They laughed and grinned at the wonder of me, but I was only a novelty. Soon enough I was back in my jar, back on the shelf to be forgotten again.
I made friends with other things he had long forgotten: a faded photograph of a smiling girl, a tiny stuffed bear, and two dead flies. I talked to them through my jar but they never talked back. Maybe they couldn’t hear me through the glass. Still, I talked for sunset after sunset until I had said all the words that anyone could ever say. And then I was quiet. For a long time. Sometimes I tried to dance, but I always hit the sides of the jar and had to just sit down again. I waited for the day when he would take me down again and maybe I could persuade him to let me loose, but that day never came. The last time I saw him, he took me down from the shelf and looked through the glass with a disgusted expression. I was gray and limp and covered in cobwebs. A useless, forgotten thing. I couldn’t hear his last words through the thick glass, but it probably wasn’t anything I wanted to hear anyway. Because the next thing I knew I was tossed into a bin with a faded photograph of a smiling girl and a tiny stuffed bear. My jar shattered at the bottom and speared clean through me. I felt bad for getting blood on the smiling girl’s face.
She saw stories in everyone she met. The artists, bankers, the housewives, the strangers who always smiled to others on the street. The coffee shop regulars and irregulars, the drunks and the hookers, the good girls, the honor students, and the dropouts. That cashier who always daydreams behind the counter and the shop owner with heavy, tired eyes. She saw their stories written on their faces, balancing delicately on their eyelashes and hiding in the corners of their lips. Everybody was a character or a plot twist. The ultimate end? The final moment that wraps it all together? Well she hasn’t deciphered that yet. But she knew it was there. She picked up the gossamer threads of their lives, unknotted and wove them together with slim nimble fingers so they made sense in a beautiful, shimmering fabric. Took this and sewed a dress worthy of a goddess. People gawked at it and marveled at its beauty. They begged to try it on, but it would fit none of them. This was not for them. This was for the story element she hadn’t found yet. The thing that would complete her masterpiece. She searched high and low for the the one that filled all the spaces, that raised her epic to a level of divinity she had never even contemplated. She sifted through person after person, businessmen and single fathers and strict librarians and wistful singers and aimless vagrants and lovestruck teenagers and drug addicts lying strung out on street corners. Every walk of life she considered, every ordinary nobody to the local oddities to those who were bred to be somebodies. Still, no luck. Because, you see, she saw stories in everyone besides herself.
I just have to share. These are drawings that were drawn on my AP Lit teacher’s board by one of her students.
Accurate.
He wrapped his arm around my waist
His hand pressed against my back
And pulled me to him
Chest to chest
Then lips to lips
And his breath was my own
His heat was my own
We sank into each other
Until
It was impossible to tell
Where one ended
And the other began
We lay together after, sweaty and hot and dripping. Covers thrown off in a desperate attempt to cool our bodies, though that proved irrelevant when she cuddled against me. I hated the way she hugged my arm and settled her head onto my chest. She was just someone to have around, someone to stave off loneliness and blue balls. I’d told her that plenty of times. She would smile and nod and say, “Alright,” just before going down on me. She was good at that. But later she would do this shit: get close to me like we were something. Try to chat and kiss and snuggle like a proper couple. Some nights I tolerated it; some nights I pushed her away. Tonight I was too tired to care and tuned out her voice to focus on keeping the buzz from climax going as long as I could.
“Hey,” she said very suddenly, tugging at my arm a bit to make me look at her. I groaned, glared. Lost on her, as always. “What the hell are those?” she asked, jabbing a finger at small black dots on the wall.
“Carpet beetles.”
“Beetles? Ew. Why are they there?”
I sighed. The buzz was long gone. They were there because I felt bad for squishing them, for crushing out their life with a tissue-covered thumb. They were there to remind me they existed. They were there because everything deserves to be remembered. I told her none of this. She wasn’t worthy of that kind of information.
She leaned over me to see them closer. Stared for a moment, then crinkled her nose in disgust. “These should just go.” And I watched as she scraped them off with her fingernail, their fragile, empty skeletons crumbling to dust at her touch and falling to the floor. One by one, they disappeared into oblivion.
She came back down to me and cuddled into my side again. “That’s better,” she mumbled as she settled her cheek against my shoulder.
And that was the last night I spent with her.
I’ll never forget the lines of her: the length of her torso, the columns of her legs. I will always remember in perfect detail the bend in her arms and the dip of her waist, the rise of her hip. She was the ocean. Muscles undulating beneath flesh, the ability to be tender and give gentle caresses, but still wild. Still mercurial and mysterious and absolutely irresistible. They way her body s t r e t c h e d beneath me, inviting me into her murky waters. I couldn’t see the bottom, couldn’t see where my feet were taking me. She kept her secrets well hidden with sly smiles and coy glances that made me blindly step further into her. My toes, my ankles, my knees, my waist, my neck, and then I was sinking. Drowning. Drowning in her and I couldn’t get myself to mind, because she was still smiling at me and whispering soothing things in my ear. I would gladly drown, as long as it was only her water filling my lungs.
Sunday morning forces me to church where I cringe at every hymnal sung by warbly sopranos and shield my eyes from the sunlight filtered through stain glass windows. Does Jesus’ face really need to be that bright? If God is kind, he would understand the need to stay home on Sundays as his subjects nurse whiskey hangovers. Then again, it’s quite possible that God is an asshole. In fact, I’m certain God is an asshole. I have eighteen years of living with my mother and ten more years of painful family get-togethers to prove it. Fake smiles and forced laughter and hours of listening to my dear mother worry and fuss over my sinning ways. “Still single, huh? Tsk tsk. Aren’t you getting a bit old for dating? Well, at least you aren’t still going out with that… musician. If you could even call him that. Why can’t you just find a nice man—a lawyer or something—and settle down? Have some kids and be a mother. Nobody goes for a woman nearing her thirties still hanging around bars and certainly not one that wears things so low cut. (For goodness’ sake, pull your shirt up! Can’t you ever cover up properly? You don’t need to have everything… hanging out.)”
Ah, yes. Sweet mother of mine. I look down and finger a cross someone’s scratched into the pew in front of me with their fingernail. And get a sharp elbow to the ribs. No break of focus goes unnoticed. I glance at her and her lips are pursed in a thin line, and expression I’ve become all too familiar with over the years. She glares and pointedly gives a tiny jerk of her head towards the reverend at the front.
I obey.
Because I am still a child and she is still my mother and it will always be this way even when delicate crows’ feet form at the corners of my eyes and I start to dye my hair to hide the gray. There is always a little girl inside me afraid of the sting of her mother’s hand, terrified of the way she shakes her head and turns away that can hurt you more than any physical blow. I look like a grown, God-fearing woman now, but I know better. You do too. We’re all just babies reaching out with wanting hands for those who are supposed to love us most.
It almost seemed wrong, he thought. His hard jawline, graying stubble and thinning hair. His aged, creased skin and his heavy browline. All this next to her youth, her suppleness. How could the world allow this? How could his knotted fingers skim along her full cheeks and dewy flesh and get away with it? Both adults, in all technicality, though that didn’t make it feel like any less of a crime when she invited him to her bed and gave him her pale bare back for him to mark as he pleased. Didn’t make him feel any less guilty when he snapped out of his animal stupor and saw the red trails marking the paths his short nails had taken as they ripped apart her tempting wholeness. Astonished, as always, when she covered his thin lips with her full ones before pulling back and smiling at him. His little Lolita, but she was so much more than that. She was a girl and a woman and a goddess and some other-worldly creature he couldn’t even name.
They always ended their nights together on the floor, bathing in shafts of pure moonlight as they listened to the sound of each other’s breathing and pens scratching against paper. The exchange of poetry seemed even more intimate than the exchange of touch. In those moments, with only the stars as witnesses, they were equals.
I was four (and a half) when I first went to church. A friend’s church. Not ours. We didn’t have a church. It was for Easter so my mother put in a frilly, pastel dress. I wasn’t sure why you had to dress “extra special” to go meet God. But we went all dressed up and sat in the middle pews, right next to the stained glass. I remember it being big, but it’s hard to know for sure because I was so small. We stood and opened little red books to sing words I didn’t know the meaning to, to sing the joys of a man I didn’t know coming back to life. I wondered if a wizard had done that or if maybe he was awoken with true love’s first kiss. Like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty.
But the pastor didn’t mention a kiss. Just a man in the sky who liked Jesus so much he took him for himself. He didn’t talk about bunnies or chocolate or colorful eggs, the only things I knew Easter to be. We went back home and I was four (and a half) so I asked mom what God was supposed to be. She didn’t tell me he was a bearded man in the clouds or some larger, unnameable entity far away from us. She told me, “God is everything.”
“God is everything? God is the leaves and the trees and the grass?”
“Yes.”
“God is the people?”
“Yes, God is the people too.”
“God is the sun?”
“God is the sun. God is everything.”
God is everything.
We had our Easter egg hunt and I forgot about God for a while. But then a few days later I had to rake leaves—because we had proper front and back yards then with thick, tall trees, not like the pathetic patches of sod we’re stuck with now—and I stood in awe of God. I raked leaves into piles and with each one I gathered, I thought, “That’s God and that’s God and that’s God too.” The wildflowers were God and the pile of pine straw beneath the tree in front of our house was God too. The dandelion seeds that I blew into the wind, the ants busily building their mounds of dirt, the air I sucked into my lungs. All God. I had God inside me and God touching my skin. God was every color and every shape and every sound I’d ever heard. God was here and I could touch it because God was everything. And I spent that afternoon reveling in this new knowledge and feeling God for the first time.
