While I can

Train tracks. Our feet match, stepping one slat to the next. Our hands swing in time, fingers laced together - so soft & solid - my hand curled against yours. Twighlight trails the setting sun and a thousand miles away my sister hurls herself into the highway as if it might save her. You, silent, support me as I support her. I could lean into you and not fall, but we walk instead. She calls back again. Her fiance's got another lover and she doesn't know if it's insanity or the bottle. Either option terrifies her. No answers yet. You squeeze my hand as I talk her off ledges. Her first call interrupted a discussion of your infidelities. I thought she'd be the one talking me off your ledge, a sudden four story drop, but she didn't hear me crying and she was already stripping asphalt in a craze to find home. You, being the resident expert on mental illness and addiction, took the vacant position of consultant and confidante. Helps that you're my best friend, your propensity to repeatedly risk breaking my heart aside. Maybe you will someday. I might run out of highway and find my heart hurling at 70 miles an hour toward a brick wall. Would you clean up the mess? I'm not sure you would. I guess that's why I'm heading for the backroads. Bus stops and waiting stations feel safer. Still, then I might be left behind without transport. A siren interrupts that thought and we look behind us into the blaring headlights of an oncoming train. We jump off the tracks, screaming and laughing into the rusted flash of roaring metal. I jump & stomp & squeal. I get it all out, made invisible by this thunderous body of steel crashing by, cradled by the rushing air thick with noise. My sister on the other end of the line wondering what the hell happened. I have to explain. She wonders why I'm with you, whether she says it or not. She wonders if she's headed for the same brick wall. She can't believe it. We say goodbye so I can call Mom for Mother's Day.
Then it's you and me again, walking past the power plant hand in hand. You lie me down on the street corner, under the flourescent street lamp, and read me a love letter. I'm supposed to feel lucky and I do. Your chest is always the best pillow and I feel you open to me in that way that melts my resistance. It may come back. Regardless, we know we're headed for a parting, so we love while we can. You love me. I love you while I can. While I can.

Thoughts of long ago

It's up. The image. The archetype. Something I read caught an edge & it's tipping over the embankment. I feel the gravity of it. I watch it fall, endless weight. No bottom. He couldn't love sex, but he had to have it nevertheless. I used the wolf of red riding hood to describe him to myself when I finally got it. He used the weight of my body to crush his self-loathing. It didn't work. I dematerialized at the crucial moment and he was left with only shame & rage. I had no framework for his way of seeing except misogyny. It took longer to see addiction. It took longer to admit that I felt used. Where did I get such perserverent optimism? Such naivete? Only a history of abuse could explain why I stayed through the upheaval, but I couldn't pin that history. The one link that took me by the scruff was my grandmother who was quickly losing her mind in a mess of abusive delusions. Or was it all just coming back to haunt? Why is it that I desire to understand human suffering so deeply? I built a model concentration camp for 4th grade history day. No doubt the judge found the cottonball smoke billowing from a foam-core board gas chamber just a little unsettling. No doubt they found the pipecleaner firing squad downright distasteful. Was this an 8-year old's strategy for dealing with German guilt? But, somehow I remember feeling the atrociousness of it all alongside survival, redemption, faith in God against all odds. Was I looking for a real-life adult replay? Can I survive against the odds? That wasn't my question going into it, but I certainly learned I could by the time all was said and done, denied & reclaimed.