blur

This bar is blasting bad music and my eyes are closing under the weight of compounded cloudless afternoons. Foolhardy starry nights and their heavy mornings. My body’s bare minimum. The sun is past its peak in the sky and I’m waiting the day out like a lion in the grass. Hiding, hot solid body in dry yellow grass, lingering long enough to get my brain back from the mean one. The one who doesn’t ease their heel off a neck, patient for the patience that will come after. I want to shoot the bar speakers off the high wall, perched like hunters on lookout spots above my head. Abrasive corny punk, whiny voices, devil’s advocate voices. They used to be a band aid for loneliness, not a companion. Not a savoir. They make me feel small and irritable when they come back around, any sentimentality obliterated by the feeling of wanting something better, more interesting or useful and sweeter. The Smiths come on instead and my shoulders slump like I’ve been shot with morphine. Sweet relief, strange familiarity. I shouldn’t be with people when I’m like this, I shouldn’t record my thoughts when I’m like this. I came into the world to feel alone and alone is what I get. Jumped up from my nap like I’d been burned by the hot air of my bedroom, the commitment to get out, rest between plans slowly warping into wasted minutes and hours of my one precious life. Now, I order pink wine and the server gives me free chips and salsa. She said it was something to snack on while I worked, from her. My stomach jumps, the air in my cheeks tense. To be treated kindly by strangers when I’m low is when I feel closest to god. God, universe, spirits. The manager comes out to talk to me and sends out free churros. Asks how the sweetness was and says it was inspired by me. To think, sugar and me together, like sisters in a shared room. Lately, I’ve been trying to be that good. Not real good, not angelic, but how I was taught to be good, by doing what I think other people would like me to do. I can’t be like that all the time, I shouldn’t try, my cracks start to reappear. Like a house that was built wrong, when it rains for too long the broken parts start to show. My brother told me last year, a revelation I tried to minimize. Let anger out like an exhale, like a birdsong, like a plane hum. Not a sharp siren, not a final goodbye. I feel it when it’s right at the surface, I hide it when it’s deep. I let it build up. And then, dark burnt snarls of the broken parts of me steal my sound and use it as their own. I need to let them bleed.

I have to remind myself that I’m not being tested and I’m not being watched. I have to prove that I should be loved - when I’m like this. My body, a compounded reservation for my parents and parents and parents’ childhoods. They can heal if I try hard enough, if I carry them inside me forever, if I spend a lifetime untangling our twisted and knotted chains. Does every woman feel like this? Like they’ve been held back by a fist in their hair and convinced to stay. Who is to blame if I’m here alone, or has this gross pattern finally worn itself out and now I’m fed up enough to blame myself. I’ve been wrecking it all, my hand like a vice, the only person who knows well enough how to make me stay, the only one who can convince me to leave. On any other day, I would be able to bend and bounce around you, but you caught me when I’m like this, so I run. I become a dark burnt blur and blend with the future. Streaked, edgeless.