I spend my mornings letting lukewarm tea pool in the secret crannies of my mouth, tasting the ancient wisdom of leaves. Each sip flushes the words my prince folds and tucks between my teeth, the poetry of a kiss stopped with the cork of academic chaos. Strangely, my insides aren’t shivering with that faceless wolf of anxiety – well, perhaps an occasional tremor here and there, but eased quickly with lists written like prayers to my soul.
“Be still, spirit.”
Sometimes I think my bones are the ivory home of a thousand spirits, and those moments when tears spring, sudden and unexplained and burning, it’s merely the condensation of their breaths collecting in the spiderwebs of my irises, the basins of my pupils. Maybe that’s why I’m so ambivalent.
Yet, these days, I taste the sweet of ‘sure’ more often. These days, I’m busy braiding pastel threaded highways between my mind and my cardiac cardinal, so that they may whisper to each other at night while I dream my lucid dreams. Waking, I understand what I feel, and feel what I understand. Simplicity is hardly palpable, yet I’m learning the art of simplifying the complications that feed the beasts whirring in the pit of my stomach, begging for decay.
I refuse to splinter and decompose. I vow to blossom and grow.
Last night I dreamt that I took a hammer to a pocket watch, its face the color of your not blue not green eyes. Sitting with tangled legs, I crunched the gears between my molars, spat out the Roman Numerals, and picked my teeth clean with the crooked hands. Time wasted. The rusted metal left a bitter taste that even the mint of tooth paste failed to erase come morning and the reluctance of eyelashes sticky tired like honey. Oh Honey, you’re a fool. And don’t get me wrong, I’m one too, trusting Hope, that backstabbing bitch. I should’ve listened to the uncomfortable itch, a flea in the back of my mind, Intuition’s warning cry. Cross my fingers, hope for regret. Paint my lips red and kiss those cigarettes. I’ll eat oleanders for breakfast and burn bundles of sage in my ribcage, chasing away the optimistic ghosts. Let this smirk be a boast, a toast to my new position of a Freelance Romancer, self-employed and oh so choosey. Unless you’re fluent in semantics, you won’t be able to charm this small-footed, small-handed comet; I’ll only kiss for sonnets, recited with a feverish passion. Anything less, and I’ll orbit on with reckless abandon.
These dry hands, these corpse-cold hands, these clenching hands, they’ve been ripping fistfuls of unwashed hair and I’ve been weaving the strands of burnt gold into chokers a touch too tight. Maybe then these other souls, dancing in the wrapping paper carcasses of materialism, will understand how I’ve felt. How I still feel, sometimes. Choking on words inflating with each thud of my heart against ribs, choking on food that tastes like ash, choking on the dust of my molars, I could barely swallow the warm wishes, the school-child chattering of gifts, the excitement of Boxing Day sales. If my throat wasn’t holly red and raw from nights of screaming, I would’ve thrown a Fuck You to the universe, a thin and desperate and tired-eyed child on a rooftop. There are burning plains behind my eyes and bitter, rotting fruit beneath my tongue, and I’m sure the police could smell it on my breath, this sickening bitterness, when they asked about how my sister kicked in a door to get to me. I offered them the bent lock in my palm, stifled the urge to spit my words in their faces. I offered them the broken frame from a portrait of my little brother who has grown up too fast. I offered them the black shivering mass of a blind dog kicked in the face. I offered them the empty bottles of sailors’ rum, the amber glass I’ve grown to detest. What I couldn’t offer them was the bubbling concoction of love and hate hissing and simmering in the tender spot above my pelvis, the way it rises up my throat like bile and threatens to leave my tongue blackened.
And yet the New Year, the year of the world’s crumbling, dances like the silk ribbons I tie to brittle branches in my dreams, a touch whimsical and heartbreakingly hopeful. I’m bitter, sometimes. I’m human, after all. A human girl with tangled hair and bruised knees, a human girl with weak wrists and impossible burdens to carry on invisible charm bracelets. And I’m only just beginning to realize this, that sometimes it’s okay to narrow my eyes and let this stubborn smile drip to a scowl, teeth chewing on the cud of self-pity. But only sometimes. Like an infrequent tide, it recedes, leaving me a little damp, but still standing, shivering with toes and shins numb. I’m stronger than I like to think, and this New Year I will sing, under breath and between each unsteady step, Vivacity not Fragility, Vivacity not Fragility, Vivacity not Fragility. These next twelve months will be better simply because I choose for them to be. I plan to medicate with books and my ever faithful words, not deprivation and deterioration. I plan to let my nomad heart be stilled, not by 4am phone calls or lusting hands, but maybe by a fox-tongued boy fluent in sarcasm and wit. And dear god, I plan to take the shit thrown at me, the scum and grit gift-wrapped by the universe and so-called loved ones, and use it to drag boundaries in the sand. I won’t stand for it, because I’m married, committed by golden rings and this vow here, to the notion of Better. This year will be Better. I will be Better. And you better fucking believe it.
I wish there were foxtails in my head, painting the dreams that are so elusive when I wake on the backs of my eyelids with the colors that come from the petals I crush between my teeth as I sleep. Then I’d have a gallery of my mind’s most intimate thoughts, the ones that are too secretive for the roused brain, and I’d cradle their meanings in my Winter hands for warmth each morning. If you’re lucky, I might kiss your eyes with my thick lashes like a Swallowtail butterfly, each wisp a glimpse. You said, after all, that I was a mystery, a bunch of loose ends and tangled threads. Maybe, through my dreams, you could learn to know me.
You know, now that I think about it, I must be lucky, but like a trampled clover or a disembodied rabbit’s foot, lucky like the star that’s plummeted to earth, lucky like the tarnished penny on the roadside and the charm lost in the washing machine. I must be lucky in all the wrong ways, a black cat painted white. At least I got to taste your grin, trace your scar-tissue stories.
Time was never kind to me. He sneers with rust-colored teeth and waves a pocket watch like a pendulum before my eyes. No wonder why days slip like granules of un-melted glass through my mind’s two trembling hands. No wonder why my tongue trips on the day of the week, month, year. And Circumstance smirks, French-Manicured nails digging deep behind my African Violet bruised little knees, leaving me buckling and tasting dirt.
But I just keep whispering quietly to the cobwebs on my ceiling each night, lips blue from Winter’s kiss, “Maybe a four-leaf clover will grow in the flowerbeds of my molars. Maybe, maybe.”
I’m the luckless lovechild of Wishful Thinking.
(On a side note, I've stumbled across my writing on Tumblr a few times. Before reposting any of my pieces, could you please ask? Thank you, darlings! I just want to make sure that I get properly credited.)
