hay una foto de nosotros, ¿no sé si la recuerdes? pero en ese momento, yo tenía 11 o 12 años y tú…9 o 10, yo creo. estamos parados en la arena por la playa y llevamos sonrisas por nuestras caras. yo llevo un traje de baño morado o azul, algun color así, y yo recuerdo que pensaba que soy gorda en el momento que que nos dejó ciegos el flash y el sonido del obturador nos hace eco entre las orejas, estábamos felices, ¿no? antes de que te destrozara este mundo, esto es como yo te recuerdo.

antes que haciste como si no existiera yo. y el dolor no es mi dolor, me duelo porque no hay nada que yo puedo hacer. estoy atada de pies y manos.

You wind up so gaslit into that you are too touchy, too sensitive, if you just went alone with what he wanted, everything would be okay. Go ahead, go out, go have fun, but while you’re out, or when you get home, I’ll do everything in your power to make you feel guilty. You say you want to go to the beach? Bitch, I’m not like you, and we wind up in the city, and then you leave, and hindsight isn’t 20/20, it’s 20/10, and the fact that your lives together was a whole exercise in the ways in which you could be controlled and the ways in which he tried to exert control. You kept hedging on small things just to avoid a confrontation, and all of a sudden you have no autonomy and you don’t know what was real and what wasn’t.

Sometimes things jump out at me, and it’s like last week when I was at the Cheesecake Factory with my cousin and we wound up at the tables on the side, where you can feel the ribs of the patrons next to you move in and out as they breathe, and the couple next to us, the guy was talking to his girlfriend just like my husband talked to me, and it was horrifying from the next table over, but it never seemed that way when I was there. Clearly, it was insidious and soul-crushing, but it incited such panic to listen to the exchange next to me, and all I could think after they left was, why did I never panic when it was me?

You learn to accept the reality of your day to day, I suppose.

We didn’t have kids together, true. But I have these weird days, where it’s like an out of body experience, and I go to the mall and then I get Chipotle and I get a fucking hand packed pint of Stewart’s mint chocolate cookie, and I watch Lock Up Raw and To Catch a Predator Raw all night long, and I sleep naked, and while I’m doing all this, there is this weird consciousness of how I couldn’t do these things before. You were supposed to tell me if you were going to go somewhere, do you really need to eat all that? If you were going to go out, I hope you put makeup on, ice cream is why you’re so fat, you watch those shows because that’s the kind of guys you like, prisoners and child molesters, and if you didn’t want it why did you come to bed like that? And you just accept that because it’s your reality and that’s what you have to do to survive, that is what you have to do to keep breathing.

Hold your breath for a while. Survival looks different without the distraction of your chest rising and falling. That’s all.

There is a debauchee inside my chest, awakened by the clanging of empty

JD and Absolut bottles, knuckles white on prison ribs.

“Personality type: drunk” is how my early twenties would be classified

in one of those medical studies they do at prestigious universities,

most likely by grad students wearing an eau de Jaeger bomb.

You were collateral damage from one of Bloomberg's greatest hits,

the Smoke Free Air Act. You become a pedestrian

caught between the end of a cigarette and my hand holding a lighter, and my dress

crumpled in the corner of the room, was just a secondary casualty from the

last cuba libre you slid across the bar at me.

I have found love, and it is spelled V-O-D-K-A. Phillip Morris International

owes Bacardi back dividends for all the cigarettes I smoked while under

the influence, and the collective male psyche should buy stock in both for

all the pussy they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

There are times in your life when anyone will do, when it's too dark to

see if there is a light in the other's eyes and when the extent of

pillow talk is me closing my eyes, weary of the miles behind me

and those yet to go, and imploring you to stop talking. 

Please. Just stop talking.

Rum was my wingman, convincing everyone that there was

a light in my eyes, convincing the man who is eyeing me from

across the bar right now that I would be good enough for tonight.

The problem with sobriety is no more drunk sex, not ever again,

so this man's mannerisms and intonation get under my skin,

and I realize I'd rather be dead than go home with him tonight.

The whole thing reminds me of that last time we got together and

the moment that I sobered up beneath you in a hotel in Chelsea,

looking at myself in the mirror nailed to the ceiling above us, looking

for anything that reminded me of home, and I couldn't find it in you at all.

Instead, I found an empty liquor store bag and the

loneliness that hides in the shadows of sober living.

Inside, there was a heart throbbing in 6/8 time inside of an empty bottle of 151,

proof that if I'd cleaned up a long time ago, I'd have realized

that it was never my heart doing the talking, but the bottle,

which was never anything but

a bully in the playground of human relationships, leaving

the ground under the monkey bars riddled with glass and

leaving me too scared to do anything but hang.

I radiate sidereal light. I am a hurricane through a room, I am a comet that appears every 700 years. All eyes on me. But you could not tolerate this, you could not accept this. I stifled and subdued, and when I bubbled under the surface, you demanded more control and continue to exhibit control in the only ways you know now. Now you are gone, and I was the problem. I did not play the role in your saga well enough is your excuse, when the reality is you did not know how to deal with a woman who knew how to talk back.

The ride home is always shorter, left to the interpretation of weary eyes and hearts. I wanted you to be Sambuca black with a voice like molasses, but I remember you as the moment that the Absolut wore off and I sobered up beneath you, left to stare at my reflection in a mirror hung sloppily from the ceiling of a nameless hotel. Painfully real. A bad taste in the mouth. Permanently temporary, like a child's hands in wet cement.

The teenager at the corner store grabs my Newport shorts and asks for my ID, like we haven't done this a thousand times before, like I'm not in a hurry to see you, and he looks real hard at my license which the state of New York has not-so-wisely entrusted me with, and asks me if donating my organs  hurt.

No, not too much.

I didn't need my stomach because I only use it to eat my way through your absence, a peace offering to the rumble of longing. My liver was already on its way out from drinking my 

way through the better part of the last four years and the early part of this one, and what does a spleen do? I can tell you what a pancreas does, but I didn't need one of those lying around, taking up space in my living room, leaving dents in my sofa cushions and changing the channel without consultation.  

I didn't need my eyes because I can find my way around your body by touch even in the darkest of rooms, I gave away my nose because your scent was firmly embedded in a place found beyond my olfactory nerve.

I gave all these away freely, laid them over sleeping crackheads so they wouldn't freeze, I gave my liver to a wino whose ascites was getting too big for his clothes.  

My heart was a gift, but I never gave it away. I didn't have time to wrestle it back from the man before you and exposing these things to the elements just leads to oxidization and rust, and do you know how hard that is to get off? I just let it be the porthole from which my psyche waved at you, and when you saw that I was sinking you could call in an SOS from afar. I was okay with this arrangement, and had the legal team drawing up contracts to be signed and notarized all in the name of protection.

Then I told you that I didn't want anything for Christmas, because I didn't need more space being taken up by things I didn't need, but you showed up at my door anyway, with the smallest box I've ever seen, and when I looked inside, all that was there was our hearts, mitral valves opening and closing in perfect time.

Some people say that you leave a piece of yourself wherever you go for that place to remember you by.

Morris Heights has that moment where we stood on top of your building and it rained

everywhere but that microscopic space between us, the spot where your skin turned into mine and I forgot where you ended and I began, the space that this clunky language of mine 

has neglected to give phonemes and morphemes to in an oversight of epic proportions. I asked you to be the habichuelas to my rice pa siempre. But forever, for always, ends a lot quicker than it feels like when my breath hangs in that space between us and soon  turns into a moment of lost time where a synapse misfired or you couldn't find the right word because we're stuck between two languages,  the moment that your heart stopped skipping a beat and instead dropped right into your stomach.

I don't remember what happened, not really. There is a fundamental disconnect, because all I remember is the way you looked at me and said You have a good life, nena. I wish it didn't have to be like this.  And why did it have to be? That's the piece of myself that's missing, the piece of the story that I left somewhere on Sedgewick Avenue, maybe on top of your building or at the foot of the bed where the blankets always get wound into a tight ball and it becomes the spot that my entire life seems to migrate to, and soon enough I am pulling out divorce papers and green cards and makeup brushes and my favorite bra and the Yankees fitted I asked you to never take off in solidarity to my eccentric desires, Metro cards and that feeling they call kilig in Tagalog, the feeling that you got when your hands first wandered up my shirt, another word this language doesn't have a sound for except the pounding of a heart over a Yankees game and I need to get this moment back. I need that moment back more than I need the first breath I ever took and the last breath I'll ever take.

There is the nagging, pulsing thought that if I could retrieve this much from you, if I could let myself unfold underneath you one more time, maybe I could understand and just forget the whole thing, just let it go in the same way that you let it go and the light from my eyes refracted through your thumos,  what the Ancient Greeks called that passionate core you always stiffened against. 

You were a diamond in the rough, chamaco, but you just had some more work to do, and we could have been, I mean damn, boy, we almost were. You told me that I was hard, no, impossible to forget and if I showed up at your front door with a bottle of vodka and a smile, would you remember? I mean, really, no really, would you? Would you remember what to call the white light you felt as you pressed yourself into me? Would you remember how to say my name in all your colorful tongues?

I want to crawl back inside of you. What I mean to say is, I'd build an apartment building in your chest if I could and we'd never have to see each other if you didn't want to, and I'd even leave your new girlfriend alone, even though she's me except more Lower East Side than busted up traffic light (I always was stop and go), but you know, you can look into my eyes as we pass in the hall anytime, and they will always be green because if you had asked me to stay, I would have said yes, I would have always said yes.

I wanted love letters and fireworks. I launched a boomerang into the cosmos, and it brought back the the taste of shame and the sound of bile rising in my esophagus. In the beginning, all you wanted to do was show me off, and I should have seen that I only existed in the ways that I could make you look good. You fired the gun, and implied consent became the bullet lodged in the curve of my hip, the scream that couldn’t escape from its shell. I learned that if I said yes once, I could never take it back, and in my naivete, this made sense, even if it was a type of sense that was painted with a thin layer of cognitive dissonance. In our wedding photos, you can see the despair in my eyes, and I felt as trapped as Barnum & Bailey’s tigers must feel. Circumstance issued me a set of blinders that recognized my need to survive, and I didn’t see the holes you were leaving from my peripheral vision. I didn’t know any better, and I don’t know if I can pin you to the metaphorical wall of culpability if the word “no” is still one I don’t know how to say. My eyes were my traffic lights, but that wasn’t enough. It will never be enough. You are the screams heard as a gun goes off, and I remembered the way you would slide your hands between my legs as I pretended to sleep, and prayed to every deity I knew that you weren’t feeling persistent. I feel broken. I learned to fake orgasms so you would go away, and I learned to stifle myself and walk on eggshells, in the hopes that I wouldn’t be insulted that day. I started feeling suffocated, and I carried my hurt on the outside of my jacket, but you either didn’t see it or didn’t care. On the rare occasion you could see it through the storm clouds and lightning, you told me I was hurt because I wanted to be hurt, that I was angry because it made me feel good, and if you came to bed like that, well, you must have wanted it. I was 24 years old and you were but a prison tattoo on my soul when I found out in a hotel in lower Chelsea that sex didn’t have to hurt, and that “please don’t do that” wasn’t always met with coercion tactics and the suffocation that came when you did what you wanted anyway. I watched my reflection on the ceiling as a beautiful boy wished me a happy birthday with his cock, and I hoped he could fuck me as hard as I hated myself. I became the smell of Newports and Jack Daniels, and you continued to be the lump in the back of my throat. The handcuffs you used to stifle me came off on the corner of Park and 42nd while my eyes shot daggers at passersby and a beautiful man with skin that reminded of chocolate with a voice like molasses and velvet told me I had the most beautiful smile. I refuse to believe that you ever knew what love was, because I’m still not as jaded as I should be. You tell me you have a woman, and you’re taking it slow out of respect for me. Respect is a word you don’t know the definition of; or if you do, it was never owed to me. I hope she is stronger than I was. I hope she has already learned to walk with a broken bottle in her hand. I still can’t have sex without the heat of whiskey burning in my cheeks. I still want love letters, and I want to be held as my body pulses with hurt that I can’t put a name to. I still feel like I need to atone for my existence. My laugh is filled with desire, and my eyes are now planets. If you stare into them for long enough, you can see Heaven, and I hope Heaven looks like the Dominican Republic and your voice doesn’t slam into me like a freight train and the holes you left in me don’t leave scars. Your hands are broken glass, and I am still pulling the shards out of my chest. I still don’t believe that I am beautiful, inside or out. I am not yet convinced that you weren’t just punishment for my not being good enough. I wish you had hit me, so I could have run and not be so wholly convinced that my body is an obscenity that I need to apologize for. I wonder if I was born to serve as a warning to others. When I have a daughter, I will teach her the word no, and how to unhook it from the sharp edges of her glottis. I will teach her how to love and let love in, and settle for nothing less than love. I will teach her to go in ready to fight and how to wage a war against not just the word, but the entire concept of abuse. I don’t want her entire life to be an extended lamentation. I don’t want her to be as tired as I am from not being able to forget how to sleep with her right eye open. I don’t want her to have all of these memories that she just wishes she could find a how-to guide on forgetting. I don’t want her footsteps to be to the beat of despair. I want her to know the things I still haven’t learned. I don’t want her lying awake at night, cursing the limitations of language for lacking a proper word for the anvil around her neck inscribed with the words “what do you call it, when you didn’t know that you were allowed to say no?”

Pretty girls don’t smoke, except when they do.
Confidence can be bought in a flip-top Newport
box and lit on fire, having even more of an
effect on your psyche than a brand new
pair of skintight jeans that you been
saving up for all month. He tells you to
holla at him next time you in the city, and you
give the side-eye to the boys hawking CDs on
the street corner, because the rap game is the
only hope for a way out they ever had, and you take
a long drag off that cigarette that always
been like a hand to hold in the moments of weakness,
and you squint your eyes like you thinking real
hard about what he has to say, and you got a train to
catch even though he asking you if you want to come back to
Brooklyn, and the second you grasp onto him press yourself
into the nape of his neck, all reason goes
out the window, so you miss the train so he can
spin you onto a bed in a brownstone on Flatbush Avenue,

and he’s like the heat of Johnnie Walker’s Blue Label
sliding down the back of your throat,
and two months later you sitting in the dark
corner of a bar in Union Square, waiting for
him, and he’s late, because that’s how he do,
and you trying to be angry, you really are,
but then he appears, without apology, because he
never apologizes, because his presence is the only
apology you ever needed and he tells you that you
not really angry, you just trying to be angry,
because you Scorpio women? You just like men. And
he’s so sure of himself, because he grew up
in the street, and he’s done his obligatory
eighteen months in Attica, and you don’t even
care because he’s so goddamn beautiful that
when you touch him, you feel like there might be a God,
and his hands on your hips are like little apologies
for all the times you been done dirty, except
he's going to do you the same.

He disappears off
the face of the planet, until he asking you to
“make arrangements” and you do, even
when he sends you a text intended for some other
bitch. And then there is blood, so much blood,
and it’s like the all the words you’ve
stuffed back down beneath your vocal cords are pouring
out all over him and he sits with you after,
so you let the remaining words stay deep inside, where
they belong, and you know you will never be in a dark room
with him again, where the only thing you can
see is the fragile transparence of your own skin.

Now it’s been three months and it’s about damn
time for his ass to pop up, because he's like a
motherfucking straggler, talking about getting
busy and losing track of time and girl, you always
knew he was busy, that he don’t have time for watching
the sun rise and set in your eyes, but you held out on
some artificial hope that…you don’t
even know what you were holding out hope for, do you?

And what kind of bitch were you anyway, thinking
you were anything special, thinking that he was
dropping a G on you because you were any
better any other bitch he could have crashed into
outside of Grand Central, but your anger abates
when you remember him covered in tattoos,
his body shining like you imagine the Pearly Gates
may shine. His voice keeps echoing in your ear, and there’s only
there's one thing that you really want to say:

“I need you to understand that I was emotionally
fragile, and I was at a very strange place in my life,
and you was a life raft that deflated under the
weight of my body, and I thought your hands on my
breasts could caulk up my broken heart which
had been sinking like the Titanic for years. Your hand prints
remain on the backs of my thighs, a permanent muscle
 ache, and I just want you to know that I
spent seventy five goddamn dollars on that underwear and
I’m still angry that you didn’t notice.”

When I haven’t been touched in a long time, I bump into strangers on the street so I can feel their proximal phalanges wrap around my bicep and triceps in apology, and I always pay cash so I can feel the bones in the cashier’s wrist slip away from mine, like sand through the cracks of a well-made boardwalk. I sit at an angle on the subway, so I can feel my thighs rubbing against someone’s right patella. I take phone numbers from strange men so I can feel their hand pressed against my lumbar vertebrae as they talk themselves up (or in), and tell me lies about how I am the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen; I tell them it’s all in my zygomatics and let it linger so that I know what it feels like when they move their hands down to the panniculis of my abdomen. I block the aisle at Duane Reade so you have to say excuse me, and feel my gluteus maximus as you intentionally press through. I have more strange men’s contact information than I could ever use in this lifetime. I won’t call, anyway; emotional availability is about as likely as riding next to Jesus Christ on the morning train. I tell myself that I ride you not because I love your cerebral cortex, but because of carnal desire and the way my thighs feel wrapped around the iliac crests of your hips, and I’ll never get over the way your mandible brushes against my inner thighs. When it’s over, your medulla oblongata keeps your breathing in perfect time with mine, and maybe God removed a lobe from our left lungs so that you could take my breath away. I let you see the way my mitral and triscuspid valves open and close for you, and I’m prepared for the sclerosis that comes when you’ll go; and you will go, because they always go. I could never stay or be stayed with, yet you’ve peeled me like an onion, and in the same way of that complex vegetable, you will cause my orbital sockets to fill with tears that I can’t hold back. I’m so tired of building walls around my heart, because they are getting so thick and there isn’t much more room left in my chest to allow the heaviness of concrete alongside the required room for breathing without cracking my ribs, and I can’t figure out which one is more important: normal sinus rhythm or blocking myself from a pain that the strongest of opioids does not yet know how to touch.