If has turned itself into a well-hewn rock in my shoe. So. If, I had been sleeping on your couch, or sandwiched in between you and the paint on the wall, I would have heard the tenseness change, and the lines that were being drawn across your arm turn from my name to hers. See, I�ve thought about it, as if, you were a damp dragonfly, with wings the colour of your eyes - though now I can�t remember what they looked like when they were clear, and you kissed me in the somberness of the parking lot. I�ve thought about it as if you had many facets in your face instead of just the one, to hide what you actually think away from me. I�ve rehearsed it like that, when the pulling away is just of my skin reaching out towards your hands through the lace and the cotton. And when the reaching in is just of your breath on my ear and your cigarette smoke in my hair.

If it had gone this way or that way, you would be stretched taught over me, and the pulling back of skin over teeth, over blood, over pulse, would be something that is familiar. The names are always different, for the both of us, and I can make myself see you in stop-frame with other people, because it�s easy to do that, and it�s easy to think about it until I am coughing bile and pushing it down with my tongue; until there are red splatters and spit in the sink from smoking too much. Combustible lungs and I see the colour your hair used to be in the lights that form in my head right before I faint.

When I looked up at you, against the sun and the leaves, you understood too well that I call almost every quiet boy I�ve held hands with Sunshine. You understood too well that I am most often drunk. Most often discarded against a brick wall, most often staring at images that have nothing to do with my world aside from the rusting decay. You understood a little too much.

The pull, push, inwards, outwards, is something I can know, because it is the motions of my legs underwater, or my fingers tangling my hair to keep it from freezing in the cold. Everything painful is held in by liquid, by steam, by droplets, by standing through the hard rains, protected by a dress that is too thin. Everything comes back to the fluids. Everything comes back to the no slip-daisies that lined the walls of the shower, everything comes back to bleeding on the floor of a hallway, everything that hurts comes back to throwing up ice cream in a trash can.

I can watch you, in my head, in the lights, in the stop motion and not equate it with the way I live. The secrets that keep me from really, actually falling into your chest, pertain to that I�m sometimes scared to be touched at night, and of being thrown down into a bath tub again; that I�m still afraid of being held underwater while my insides are examined, piece, by fucking child-sized piece.

If, that had never happened, if I hadn�t been a little girl when it did, if I hadn�t been starving myself of everything when I met you, it would have made sense for it to be different. It would have made sense for the tightness of me and the softness of your stomach to fit together. Of course it didn�t work that way, because no matter how I wish otherwise, I was the girl who was horrified of having her silhouette be larger than her shadow, and who couldn�t keep sleep from the happiness of your voice at 1a.m.

I know you knew that, and that intensity and that burn is something to stay away from if you don�t want to hurt yourself and let yourself become enfolded in the rituals of it. You knew that, and walked a thousand miles away from me in the matter of days.

If you hadn�t, I can�t make the promise I would have righted myself, because then I didn�t understand why I was that way; I just knew that something in the creases of my palms unfolded when you slipped your tongue in my mouth and when I collapsed against your thighs. I was never enough in my stupidity to pull you in, just push you down a road with a different name.

Now I say, yes I�m fine, though I remember more about the abuse and it makes me cry when I listen to the tub filling up. Now I say, yes I�m fine, even though I still drink too much and I smoke too much and I buy too much. Now I say, yes I�m fine, even though little children�s hands reaching towards mine, make my colons twist up with worry and an overwhelming desire to keep everything crystalline safe. I worry that if I ever have kids I�ll hurt them that way, because the research shows if it�s been done to you, you�re more likely to do it. This is what I worry about now, not if my hip structure is fucked from the pulling, or if my posture is bad from that misalignment. I don�t think I could ever say to you or any other man �I want to have your baby.� But that�s okay, isn�t it? You never liked young voices anyway.

If you�d let me bloody your bed sheets, I would have cried from that well inside me that made me drag razor blades along my legs, and now fingernails across my ribs. Another secret: I used to cry when I�d make myself come, but I�ve shredded enough tissues to work that part of the sadness out. I still think about you like you were a dragonfly and that I�m some decomposing lily in a Chinese water garden.

The question I meant to form, those days, was if you wanted to sit on the leaves that supported me and if you wanted to help build up new pink tinged petals. It never came out that way and I�m the sorriest for that. And I�m sorry for all the things that I�ve made up to justify the human nature that draws me to you. I won�t ask you anymore, any of the things I want, because I�m so aware that you�ll just close every eyelid that you possess.

My feet get blistered from the walking, the pacing, the stones on calloused skin, when I create an absolution out of tarmac.