A fleeting & recurring moment of rupture

1. ten years ago.

Middle of the morning we are wide awake, replaying how we got here. I ask you how many women you have slept with. You say an outrageous number that makes me insides fold and fold and fold, like origami. Or a sinkhole collapsing in on itself. Maybe a sensation between the two. So, should I get tested then? Like, that’s a lot of women. I say, in the most hauntingly patronizing tone that sounds like my mother. The one I observed and scrutinized and reflected on time and time again when standing in front of the mirror and swore I'd never use because, wow, how ugly do I look? And I see it now. Feel it now. Shame suddenly in the room with us, sitting in the corner. A small dirty gremlin. Dark and looming and a little demented, if I'm being honest. He popped up that dark morning at 2 am and never really knew when to leave. Or we didn’t let him leave, always needed him on call. We both had use for him, definitely. Both would use him in moments of self-doubt. Moments of victimhood, unease, discomfort, more shame to top off our heaping, overflowing sack of shame. No, you sharply punctuate, you don’t. Why would you even say that? I don’t know, I laugh to hide my fear. Fear of you, fear of what I am to you lying naked in your bed. Your eyes are really squinty, is what, in this moment of gut-wrenching vulnerability, I manage to say. You’re an asshole, you say. I know. I know I am. Deliver it like a slice of cut clean bread. Smooth layer of buttered sarcasm.

2. a fleeting & recurring moment of rupture.

Numbed out hours turn into days in your familiar but dissolvent company. Mind quaking in the absence of you as you lay inches from my face. In the morning, grasping for open air far from you. Then, feel suffocated by your distance. The entire contradiction of existing alongside your existence. Pacing in a circle, a riptide that you dip in and out, getting stuck in a tormenting current of solitude and stillness. Wordless around you. Throat cold and wet, no words to spew up. It stays wet around you from all of the muddled bodily functions that take dull and long holidays in your presence. You stare at me with eyes slim and beautiful and gray like the day I came back to America. I take it all in with dreadful hesitation of where your mind will go in relation to how long you’d like to keep looking. I am never quite afoot. Never quite awake; want to slap myself often and shake my little head to say something smart. Say something loving. You won’t. All the while my feet under me slipping on wet stones. Like Italy in December. If I look unsteady it’s because I am. But then you, no passenger in my delusion. You hide yours in the subtleties, the strings of days where I do not hear from you. That time at breakfast you said I was crazy, just to look at me with a smirk wreaking of pleasure, pleasure taken in seeing me swallowed in my own stillness. You want me to erupt. In hate, love, drag me out of a wallowed and liquified indifference. You won’t. Keep moving places, moving timelines. Moving sentiments all the same but delightful in their wanting and wavering. Far from you, close when I’m drunk at 9pm and looking at black sky and white moon. Fast forward to morning and I am floating on time and shifting stirring moving air. Timeless movements, surmounted to days and months and lives I am living without you.

3. nine years ago.

I walk in frozen temperatures. Crystalized sheets of clear, cracked coverings on washed out walkways. Trapped water. Me, hyperaware and rigid as I move my way to you. Mind matching body, rigid and solid and drying out. When I reach your door my chest bones and chest vessels and everything else around this general area suddenly constrict, tighten around my heart: the last moving piece. Dread for facing what I don’t but already do know. You answer the door and your smile makes me want to die. I want to curl up in a ball right there at the foot of your door on the cold hard entryway. Have you lean over me, hover my body with yours, cover me up so I can no longer see. Like a greyhound that buries itself to rid itself from mind movement, rid itself from the noise and the curiosity and the overwhelm of outward worldliness. Gently pick me up and wrap me with warm blankets and whisper that you love me and yes, it will all be ok. Instead, you look at me with that pitied look of yours. My stomach, a giant knot of neglected emotion, waiting for the drop. We have sex. Cold and depressing in its succession. I wish you would just hold me but this feels more appropriate, yet entirely inappropriate at the same time. Easier to dull the noise, nonetheless, the growing anxiousness covering my insides. My organs, as if being slowly wrapped in plastic. When you have finished, you roll over, naked thighs against my shoulder, your body always threatening me in ways separate from physicality. Reaching over me, chest almost smothering me. Almost scream to get off, decide to hold on for a few seconds. Then, finally reach your laptop and gently situate it, perfectly balanced on each of our hip bones. Skinny kids, both of us. I ask if you slept with her and you stare at the screen. Did you, I ask. Quiet and pleading and gentle like I am. I mean, you say, and you let out that laugh. Sharp pain to the stomach. Makes me want to vomit all over all at once. The smirk, the avoidance, the knowing. Shame solidified. In the room with us now, once again. A warming rage starts to build in my upper chest, one that feels foreign and terrifying. She is me but worse. It’s so dumb because she is me but a worse version of me. Your mom actually thought it was me in the photos of you two. She isn’t you, though, you mutter. She’s an uglier version of me, so no, she’s not. I get up, start dressing. The desperate search for undergarments lost in sheets of male adolescence. The action, exhaustively depressing in its commonality for women. Desperate to flee, tightness gripping my chest now, my neck now. Heart pacing against a hollowed ribcage. Full of rage, but contained, always contained. Never let you see me cry. I turn to leave and you decide to finish me off. Well, I hope you don’t get anything. What do you mean, get anything? Facing your screen, avoiding my eyes. From me, I slept with her and just slept with you. Now you glance up, catch the look to make sure it stung, make sure I’ll go home and die a little later. Before I can react, I slam the door. Or, in my mind, it was slammed. In reality, I probably just looked like a lost deer. Trying its best to find an exit. Need to go home and swallow this and wish I were dead. Get outside your apartment and gasp for air. Still weary on my feet. If I were to slip on ice right now I might just end it all. Phone lights up. Look down to a text from you –

“I love you,” Want to die yet again. Hot tears on cold skin.

4. four years and seven months later.

Hailing a cab in Mexico. Late April, humidity seeping into its season. Have a safe flight, says the doorman as he opens the car door for me. I bend over and nervously settle myself, as one does. Or as I do. Scared to burn myself on scalding leather, the hot flash of solid metal fasteners grazing your upper

arm. Unnerving. I’ve always been careful to avoid pain. You, not so much. You rumble and rage towards it. Flinging your body through life. Slight tears at the corners of the seats. Worn in from other travelers, other lives that intersected with mine only for the parallel of one taxi driver. Or maybe more, multiple operators of one vehicle. Entirely possible. I think as I twist my earring, concentrate on phone lines. Wires and wires like flying snakes. My ear, still tingling with heat. New sensation, slightly aching from the ocean. Its saltiness irritating my self-inflicted wound. Weird how we puncture ourselves and decorate it up. Strange how the pain and blood and crust of it all we endure, hide with bandages, then cover with jewels. Probably a metaphor for life but it seems too muted and desperate for the moment. The moment, too quiet, like something big is coming but I don’t know quite what. Something big and sad. You noticed this immediately. I look at you and you are already there. You’ve been watching me stare at wires and worry in my sad little head about what comes next. But then, you’re always looking at me, that painful glance. Like you hate how you love me, hate how sad it makes you and you hate how much I hate you. And you hate that I won’t say it and that it’s taken us nearly a decade to get to a dulled and wringed out state of hateful nuance. Our hands reach for each other at the same time, meeting in the middle of torn seats in a Mexican cab. Bracing for impact. The body knows before the heart. My body knows but my mind won't catch up. Stuck somewhere at breakfast when I was acting like a child. Stuck in yesterday at the pier when I walked in front of you, at least fifteen yards. Couldn’t bring myself to slow down, no clue why. No idea why my mind and body can never fucking speak to one another and I wind up a feeble and mumbling bitch. Slow down, don’t be so mean. All your progress and your spirituality, losing grip. You make me lose my fucking grip. I want to cry and curl in a ball and please please hold me all the way home. You can’t, we’re going two separate places. In the airport you buy me chocolates. Say how you thought the variety pack would be good, we can try each of the flavors. You hate them all. I am too sad and deluded to eat. Sitting before the gate. You kiss my face like it’s the sky and you are painting stars. I wonder if anyone noticed and thought that was beautiful, that we were beautiful. I thought it was beautiful and when I think of you I think of my painted stars. I shed skin and dusty deadened cells and all the oceans and sweaty days I’ve had since it all has to be gone, scientifically. But I feel them there. Peck by peck. My little moles remind me that you can paint stars and that some things do last against the change. And more change. And the evanescent regard to said change.

5. five long and different years later (in my head).

I’ve always found it extremely moving. Watching birds fly, their wild uniformity. Structured delight. An artistic brilliance, right before us. We take it for granted. I was walking down the Arno in December last year, or maybe two years ago now, and I saw the most insane show of bird play. I must have sat there staring up at them for thirty minutes. They swooped and swung and dipped in the most orchestrated form. The intuition of nature, it’s breathtaking, really. All of these creatures, gliding seamlessly in line with the next. I laugh to myself now, that maybe the birds have little choreographed practice sessions before going public with their routine. But when would that happen, you say with soft subtlety, your sly aptitude. At night, of course. Using the light of the stars to guide them. If they can master routine after dusk, just think of how beautiful their ascension will be at dawn. You laugh, say I have a lot of hypothetical scenarios about animals and their undercurrent of communication. Well, they are communicative beings just like us. Everything is energy, and there is so much we don’t see. Here we go. Yea, here we go. So yea, so much we don’t see that it seems highly unlikely they aren’t communicating in ways that mimic ours, just in their own illusion of reality. All of these little realities that build into communal realities, that build into one vast expansion of everything everywhere all at once! I like to think of reality as one animal knows it, match it up against all of ours, and then life seems a little less troublesome. Takes away the feeling one sometimes has of drowning in it all. But on the contrary, you have to be careful of ending up on the other end. Floating in a state of dulled out delirium. Mhmm. Too awake to it all to know none of it matters. Not one little thing, have to pull yourself back to the middle with things like bird shows. And ice cream. I want ice cream now, then. Well, I do too. If I was with you now, we could go to that shop you liked by my mom’s house. Yea, but we both got stomach aches. Yea, one of us was always battling some form of stomach convulsion. You smile, or I imagine you smile. Sometimes, I think of how delicately we moved together. Same way we moved apart. All delicate though. How we tore each other's hearts open at times, but somehow always with this sense of acute tenderness. It was a strange thing, don’t you think? Yea, I’ve thought about it too. At the time I just thought it was love. But now I know we had something else, something not more,

not less, just something else. Maybe some past life thing, I know it’s dumb but it’s how it feels now. Being older, looking back at how old we thought we were. How mature our deflections, our assumptions of the other, our attempts to coddle the familiar and overlapping trauma. To demystify life, to naively unravel what we now know to be far more complex of feelings and actions, causality and causation. Numbed out minds grappling with inner existence and outward, terribly contradicting systems. Feels like a different life, and yet if I saw you tomorrow I think we’d fall right back into our own form of play. Like the birds, knowing exactly how to glide alongside one another. Me and you. Our game and our gremlin. Yea, just like the birds. Except the birds know all about us, and we know just enough about the birds to know they are beautiful and they are there.