The Whole Truth

the whole truth

i should start here.

[a FAQ list of things people have said] (no, it didn’t always hurt)

when i was born, the doctor said i was a girl. yes, i am a girl. sometimes.

i learned to love with broken bones. heal the cracks in your heart with pavement, beat a rhythm in the pattern of your soles. bloody knuckles & split lips taste like home, like a kiss, like someone else’s body on mine in a way that isn’t suffocating.

i was fingered before i was kissed, & no i didn’t want it. that wasn’t affection. it wasn’t even a semblance of love.

my first tattoo was at fourteen, illegal & the night after homecoming a little drunk on being wild, we thought we were so cool god, who hasn’t been there, when you’re young & stupid. everybody did it once. in the hours after midnight that little fragile peace gray asked if i wanted something to remember i said yes so we carved a star on my hip & a semi-colon on sky. we were always dreaming. even then we were like this. even then.

bleach tastes awful but i won’t ever really tell you that unless you ask. because no, not everyone needs to know when you’re breaking.

those scars are mine.

do i lie pathologically? probably. it’s a habit of protection i gained from being told i was a bitch, i was too smart, i was too athletic, i wasn’t funny, i wasn’t pretty- i was five foot nothing & not even 120 pounds but i was fat, i wasn’t pretty, i was too much & not enough & cut up all at once.

i’m trusting you with this now because i’m telling the truth. the whole truth.

it did hurt.

i am broken but not irrevocably. i am shaped by the experiences that made me but not defined by those same conditions. i am the knife & the body & the air rushing through this, i’m lying through my teeth to tell you that i’m fine.

there’s a hole in my head and that’s the whole of it. it never never stops for sobriety & suicide but after all this time:

i think i’ll be alright in the end, truthfully.

stubborn hope

the capacity of one to do terrible things is the capability to do beautiful if only given different circumstance.

we are born, and the war begins.

the first breath we take is a struggle and so is every one from there on out. when we come headfirst into this gaping maw of a world, the first thing we learn is pain and how everything is made from a wound. later we will feel the place we came from, our mothers holding hands to their chest to say we stole from their bodies and their bones, and if we were stubborn the seam of a scar will run across to show our mark of regret. we did not ask for this and still we are paying reparations for the havoc we have made in the flesh of those we loved. the beginning of learning the cost for our actions and that intent is always harm for good or worse. whether or not we meant to fight:

we are alive, and we fight on.

reverse a movie of war and you will see a different story than the one before. a plane lifting from the ground and bullets unfiring from the edges of holes stitching themselves together, and time is the unstitching and we are the movie in fast-forward to unfurl disaster from our closed fists. we are weapons we have not come equipped to disarm. we follow the paths of our missiles, mothers, bodies hurt by hands yes and not our own to have another life ripped from our bones. whether we want to or not. hold every last piece of you together to remember the first shock of the world: we were made to live, to live and survive, that stupidness that keeps us going through life: down on our knees and we still try to get up, push shaky onto unsteady ground to say come at me again, and again, and again, i won’t ever. give. up. we fight until we are a mess of wounds barely held together with sheer will, but what happens when there is no more war to win, when there is nothing more to lose?

we die. and this is what is left:

stubborn humanity. forgetting, again and again, and thinking we can rise from this past in a different manner than before. to come from anything other than pain and leave more than just our fragile bodies, a lovely imitation of how we fell into this by giving the trembling want of life our startling consensus: if we were given more than what we asked for, cleaving a hole inside something already hollow, we think we may have been something beautiful. we think that thing that we could’ve held inside our empty hands the whole time could have been named hope.

foreign(or) god

god comes down to say hi sometimes, stepping out with the people of all race and ages. god has an accent no one can discern. god is an immigrant stumbling over the foreign languages of grief, emotion, not recognising the subtleties between happiness and happy-in-this. and even god suffers from cognitive dissonance, can’t say anything the same way we do. trying to find the right words and only coming up with something we won’t understand or will tend to misinterpret. half the time god doesn’t even know what he means, those misharmonised thoughts making less and less of a self when put together. god is a collection of parts we have assumed fit him without asking. god wears the twice worn pants of someone else and has to hem them by hand. god is tired of this. god was tired when he heard this. god speaks softly so as not to wake the demons we tell children about when they come here: loneliness and depression and never really belonging. there is something so sorrow-filled in the way he begins to recognise we cannot do not want to be saved. god walks away and we justify his actions to ourselves as if he had done the atrocity. god has a limit to forgiveness and it starts with desecrating kindness. god has all the accents of the people we have turned away.

an all-nighter with planet mercury

four planets in retrograde
and we sit under the full moon to lament
our crazy revolutions. 
mercury, the rare bastard, hides in the shadow of the light,
nothing like the rest of them. a day that lasts hours and a smallness inside your bones, never knowing how to sleep because the night never seems as long. they don’t know what it means to be made of availability, the closest and the remainders of what is left. we both have hands full with drops of this monthly blood, a body’s rejected life shimmering down the side, fingers curved tenderly but still silver slips its way through the cracks.
leaking out to leave empty palms and the moon shines silver too, the stars, who are we to raise our hands and say that we belong in this night with a longing buried deep to leave? too tired to think about what it means. mid-night mercury turned to say unguarded in a hollow voice: i just feel so small, in comparison. so close, and quiet, and less. i feel like i am nothing. (not nothing. never nothing.) underneath such long nights guiding us to oblivion we cannot be nothing on the horizon. i know, mercury sighs, face half-hidden in the blinding light. and still i am so much more and so much less than what i want to be. i can’t find a way to stop myself from spilling out of my hands.

the right truth

in specific contexts, i am a different person now then i am then. alice: i can’t go back. yes, exactly what i mean. for every question there is a different answer depending on whether or not i trust you. or the setting of the situation. take these, examples,

SITUATION ONE. i am at a party. it’s a friend’s party. i was late. listen, i didn’t want to come. they can’t know that, so what do i tell them?

answer: make up some elaborate hilarious story about the cat and the driving and putting on clothes in the wrong order and not how you sat in the closet for two minutes rocking and how you took four pills for anxiety before coming. if they laugh, they won’t notice the way you slip your eyes closed too often to be real.

SITUATION TWO. i’m with my family and they ask me who i’ve decided to love (have i decided to love? do i know what that is?) can i tell them the truth of it or do i have to hold my hands palm in to my chest, don’t let the lines tell them what they want to know?

answer: you can say a little. tell them you’re in love but you’re not sure of it, don’t tell them who or what or how many because really would they want to think about you and love with their closed door minds? they can hardly think of you as it is.

SITUATION THREE. i’m seeing another therapist. oh god, what do i say. what do i tell them?

answer: the part of you that you can stand to bear on your mind. the truth that seems right under the circumstance.

for every question if you told me when and where and how i would have another answer because who i am depends on who i’m with. that may not be right, but it is true, and i’m never the same person twice. but is anyone? and that’s the kicker to this sad sorry punchline joke. nobody’s right. even if it’s all true.

the wreck of the earth

humans are in the same category
as natural disasters for things that cause destruction. we are worse than hurricanes, hollow planes above cities. a masterpiece of catastrophe.

we are well-intended, to a point. the point is this: there is something dying and we refuse to save it. to even look at the damage we have done.

i am no exception.

and this is how we wreck what we have learned to love: by trying to save it or loving it in the first place.