What the Curators Leave Out; What the Artist Wants You to Know
I. Myself
In her, I saw the forgiveness
The confusion of morning blinks in distant beds
The quiet we wish we had when we spoke to the boys
We claim to love
In her,
There I was, a clattering mess
Too much space to bear my own weight I wish I didn’t own
Because what is our own presence if not known by
The flashbulb memories
Illuminating somber faces
Or the loss of seemingly immortal youth
Leaving all too soon-
How must I mourn her?
When I can barely remember her
Only bright
bright
Stars I swear I saw but
Do not exist yet
Only lullabies and goodbyes
Only hellos and sugared snow cones
At the carnival
We almost kissed at
How may I celebrate her?
In all of her noises
And all of her spite
Her space
With little to grieve
With little to take
But with all to give.
How do we write in a way that honors all that was meant to be? We lose so much in the misremembering, in the blindness we misinterpret for truth. How do we mourn myths when they are all we are told? Voices echo until they are indistinguishable and there are no answers but two eyes asking to perceive me, waiting for permission, when there is no permission to give. I am to love and be loved by the greats. I will never have a time of death, only times of witness; where the world will ask and I will lie, blessing it to be true.
The lie? I am one of the greats. I am the myth of which you’ve been told. I am the words you try to hear within the silence of a childhood bedroom, outgrown. I am the empathy you never received and all the answers you never believed in. In me lies the only meaning that mattered: my own.
II. Yourself
The lie doesn’t need much explanation, nor help
It is only when the rooms grow crowded with questions, all unwanted,
Do I lessen myself to make space for you
You: pointed and stressed and unforgiving—
You are hidden in the shadows of my mirrors
The forced crinkle of my brows
And the phone calls from my parents,
asking me to come home
It’s far too dark for such a young
Pretty
Respectable
Girl
To be out doing who knows what
Doing who knows who
When all I want to tell them is, on these nights, they must let me go
The places I go to drown out the questioning are the loudest
And each time, I’m convinced I’m in love
With myself
With you
With the girl dancing horribly
And the boy counting on his courage to join her
These are the nights I recall feeling most human
Where my mouth may feel full of cotton, but
To wake up
To witness and to love because I can
Because this type of love cannot be found in the whites of museum walls
This is the love that asks me to remember and compose all the stories I have wished to tell
But couldn’t
The times I let myself think about you
You—
The quick whip ready on your tongue, unimpressed eyes, malnourished heart, Heaven Knows you’re Miserable all the time kind of you
Those times I feel the most grief
The most dread
The most longing
Where I will never change my house locks just to hear your voice, to hear your lies
You tell me you’ve only written ghost stories. You write them for the living. Of the living. How in the grief you create there is always anger, because somehow you are always part of the forgotten, always the ghost, and all these words, all these stories, are never dedicated to you.
And you’re right. These words are not for you. They’re for me, for her, for him, for them, for anyone but you.
III. Us
You don’t get to ask me questions anymore. You don’t get to see me mourn or laugh or grow in all the ways I know and don’t know quite yet. You forfeited your sight when you pressed your words into my side and gave them thorns and made them mine to keep and toss and hate:
Why you? Why this? It’s been done. You’ve been done, you will say.
If I have been done, then each life I have previously lived did not do it the way they should have, nor the way I would have wanted. If I have been done, then you would not have felt the desire to hold me and keep me held still.
I love in the ways I know how. And for most of my days, that is more than enough.