first love / late spring
mitski possesses me every april
memory at the doorway, lingering in the bashful light from the living room. nervously, it shuffles to the side, as it tries to escape my glassy gaze, my shaky fingers. i stare at it groggily, watching the shadows of it warp into a figure from the past: to a child kneeling in prayer, to a woman with her hands wrapped around a small figure’s throat, to a reflection in the mirror—i beckon it forward with quivering eyelashes—tremors lacing my outstretched hand. eyes half-lidded, it flow through my fingers and disappear into nothing. as fast as it appears, it leaves with a blink; the light outside now turned off.
my body never stops reminiscing, the way a broken bone leaves a harsh, jagged, history ingrained into the body. the aftermath of violence now blurred out by the fog on the mirror. even now, my chin is left aching years after I crashed my bike, when I had smacked my chin into the sidewalk so badly I needed stitches. the leftover remnants of phantom pain still eating away at the corner of face. from my head, to my toes, to my pelvic bones and wrists: aching and wandering. even my flesh remembers, skin still weeping a decade later. joints hanging messily together as i turn through shadowed fragments of a past my mind is no longer fit to comprehend. to remain malformed in scar tissue, lacerations still deep in the flesh: i live in the corpse.
a gentle dawn emerging in between my curtains, the sound a gentle whisper fluttering through the weathered fabric. to the ignorant, yet blissful touch of sunlight on my cheek, I am awakened to the sensation of liquid pooling from my legs, find myself with bloodstained sheets and ripped flesh—mauled in every sense of the word—then left dying in the morning. my eyes, unblinkingly watching the blood dry on the sheets. there’s a small voice in the back of my head telling me to get up, to go clean myself in a baptism that will remove every single wound i have ever opened. the reminders staining my body, my soul, finally gone. a futile attempt to escape from something i have learned to give into: as simple as the blood still inside my body, from the wound that is me. this soft cleanliness that i crave, evades my dirty hands.
hidden away from prying eyes, a game of hide and seek in the closet. buried deep under clothes and stuffed animals; i used to wait for hours in anxious darkness. anticipating the next blow, the newest sound to alert me to startle. the day eclipsed by fatigue and nightmares brought to life, spent with me: alone. in that dimly lit space, liminal in it’s threat, patiently waiting for any new revelation to bring me back to the present. for any ache that needs tending too, the process is meditative. the band-aids, the clean sharp smell of alcohol wipes. what came as a surprise was the carved formation of my anger, biting jaws, screams running my throat hoarse. somehow, the word memory reminds me of the word cinder; remnants of the fire still burning (always burning) in the back of my mind. the way it chokes me in the throat, even all these years later i still find myself ablaze.
blank gaze, watching the way the sunset stretches out over the evening (the flames catch on the corners of my old paintings, my room becoming a wildfire in gold, in grief). i dreamt of violence last night, watched the blood spill from someone else’s body, the lifeless eyes, the excruciating sharpness of a cut buried deep inside my womb. childhood promised something like this too, marriage and children. all i could ever desire, the secure normalcy. the fantasy breaks now, all i seem to birth is memory after memory, none i can ever seem to recall. misery in the bloodstream, it twists around my gut like an unwanted intrusion, permanently scarring my insides. the shadows waiting at the window of my room, seeping through the curtains like ink to paper, blooming figures throughout the dark. i keep reaching for phantoms, and expecting penance in return.
a world on fire: i still smell the smoke from the campfire, the cigarette. the smoke curling leisurely around the looming darkness of the lit flame. nicotine and heat lulling my senses like the moths around here. (safe and contained). compared to the candles i used to light late in the night (vanilla burning, wafting away into my breath). watching the way a paper towel erupts into a furnace of watercolor hues of orange and blue in my bathroom sink. grab the lighter i swiped from the kitchen drawer after reading that old document (2007, the year branded into my mind) to burn the stuffed animal he had given me. but my mama knocks on the door before i can descend fully into the flames.
a world in fragments: it starts with the heat in the base of my spine, trails up throughout my insides in flashes of pain. like a blade running down each of my vertebrae, cool metal to the warmth of my skin, blood leaking from the small knicks left behind. anger loose in my lungs and all i remember is: nothing. not a single ounce of knowledge to my name in my youth. blacked out flashes lasting years at a time. i’ve woken up without a name to my existence, to my place, to my time, to my very being. the faces i should know (mama, my friends, myself) scratched out like a broken mirror. all cut up pieces i cannot put together. i know it in my bones, what this is, i know it in my weeping flesh, the way it comes to me in dreams, in flashes. i close my hand around the empty space at night, until all that is left is the empty cavern of my own self.