"Anyone worth knowing breaks once.
Once.
No shame, no foul if you survive it."

what we are not told is that it is never a clean break.
it can never be stitched up
in the way that a surgeon with impeccable attention to detail
weaves the stitches
in and out, and over and under.
I cannot hide this scar you left when you drove the knife right into my chest
and twisted,
reversing the flow of blood through the heart.
I ask people to touch it, can they feel my heart beating beneath it?

My heart.
I don't wear it so much on my sleeve as I encase myself in it.
I am pulsing and throbbing, squeezing every breath out of life.
They hold me up at school assemblies.
This is your heart, and the mitral valve opens and closes,
and if you pay close enough attention you can see my soul tumble out.

I have tried to harden myself, toughen myself up
like the nicotine-hardened heart of the life-long smoker.
I gave up smoking a long time ago,
and all of that aside, people break from yearning, too.

In this room, right now, I can feel all of us
beating in perfect time.
While my mother always told me that I was too sensitive,
needed to learn to
laugh at myself,
toughen up &
grow a thicker skin,
I want no part in any of that.
The electricity that runs right through me
when I don't clear the person passing me in the stairwell
is what keeps me alive.

This only breaks you once.
Once.
Somewhere in breaking, you learn that if you want to be
someone who is trusted,
you need to be someone who trusts.

Your eyes are so empty.

Hold me tightly. Trace this scar in my chest.

It means I am still alive.

my mother tells me that I don’t need to tell
everyone
everything
I feel in the very moment I feel it.
but these words pound against my ribs,
and not the easily displaced floating ones,
but the true ones, stiff with desire.

so I don’t. I don’t tell you

how when you call me mami or nena,
my legs are as good as spread,
and how sometimes I stand at the Macy’s cologne counter
and smell your cologne, just so
I can remember how it is to take you in

how when I haven’t spoken Spanish in a long time,
the line between Spanish & English is as solid as the Berlin Wall,
but when you speak Spanish to me, you are Ronald Reagan.
& de repente, I’m at work, peering out a window, telling a coworker
dile que está lloviendo y...be careful when driving in the rain

how when these days pass and I don’t hear much from you,
I miss your voice, and could do without this unbearable ache
to wear you inside like a wall decoration

how when you tell me you love my intelligence,
it turns me on more than your hands on my body ever will,
and how we can just stay here all day instead of going out,
because I feel safe here with you and besides,
my books are here

until the words come pouring out
and I’m Harry and you’re Sally

and you’re telling me how funny it is
that you were always too scared to tell me
how you can’t stop looking at my legs because
you can’t stop imagining them wrapped around you

and you could just listen to me talk
for days

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.