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.