don't speak, my old heart
mary cassat
i have not loved enough.
i lied when i said i have to stop but i don't know what else to do. i have to stop breathing (being anything) for you or for anybody else and i have to learn to love kelli ann tompkins. i have to learn to love being alone while mirroring a potato in shape and loving potatoes and crying to the cranes and snowy egrets in the backyard, hoping they won't mind. you see, i remember the day i decided i discovered i REALIZED it was my nature to prefer safety over sorry. my sister and i were young and my brother was even younger and we were in southern utah camping with my dad (and mom? i don't know) inbetween red walls, watercolors waiting to sink into paper and the old juniper tree with sea green beads and heavy bark: my sister and i were natural climbers and attended to the red walls (red hills, red slopes, nooks and crannies) like lizards (of whom we robbed multiple tails) or bugs or something. my sister was scaling, i was short behind and reminded her to be careful. "it's better to be safe than sorry," i said. "it's better to be sorry than safe," she retorted and i turned my head and went back. bats always came out of their caves at night and we'd watch them erupt the sky into a dark-mattered, Corregio sort of spatial vortex.
you and i were a junction in numbers, falling on separate planes and living on limits that never end. i don't know where we crossed or if we were even close. did i see you from a distance? your truth brought us closer to home and my ideals left us across an ocean, unbearable with the salt and the papercuts and without a boat. where are we left, now? and i don't know (lie) where i went wrong or (truth) why i never smiled in pictures when i was little. i don't know how to dance (i don't like it either, i promise! we can finish our conversation) or to sing (to myself or to anybody else), nor do i know how to make a good dinner or let myself be really loved. i don't know how one of the lights of my day is so cheery always and so beautiful in her white dress, or how the girls who use 's' for 'z' and sit in their mother's gardens and watch elephant parades are just real-love-wonderful from books. i love and admire them, just like i love and admire girls who don't remember dying, and who live between the ocean and the universe with jeff buckley, and the girl who proclaims science as a terribly lousy lover. girls in love with science and war abridge from san francisco to new york, and the maynard-lover in the desert and full of life. my asked-for stranger is so comfortable and comforting always, as is the boy with the guitar and a heart for his compliments; the boy between montana and idaho is my long-time saviour. oh, distance! 'all the way to where my reasons end'. won't someone come save me? i don't know how to quit being somebody for a junction, 't' for a 't'. worse yet, i don't want to. worst of all, i have to for the greater good.
who am i to try and write things down (for you)? who am i to share quotes or day-old songs (with you)? breathe in sky; oh, just breathe in and breathe out. dust and air and maybe an old aspen tree inside my lungs. i just want it all back, i do.
'you took my hand, and we walked through the streets
of an emptied world, vulnerable
to our suddenly bare history'
--agha shahid ali