Pain

Distance. Safety. You might as well wear them like signs, they adorn your body so well, cover you almost like an invisible shield. You’re a fine one for masks, aren’t you? You, and your little boy smile, your innocent boy ways. Your defense lies in your openness, your naivete, your surprising purity.

Anger courses through me like another form of blood. Ever since I was a child I have fought, I have desired desperately for something to fight against. A car battery pressing painfully into my chest. I wanted pain. I formed it in my hands, pressed it against my palms. There is still an indentation in my body from that battery.

He died. He was flung from a sulky. In the chaotic midst of life he was thrown into a coma. He was wearing the wrong helmet, the beautiful one, not the practical one. He destroyed me with his death, fulfilled my need for pain for the rest of my life. Overwhelmed me with it.

My small body leaning against the door frame, I prayed for my grandmother’s life, though I never knew her, though she had beat my mom. My naked back pressed against the carpet, I closed my eyes, whispered words, hot breath against my hands. I hated clothes. Flipping through photo albums now, I see dozens of pictures of me half nude; stepping from a suit case, my mouth pouting, angry at my mom who always photographed me. My father sitting in the egg chair, haggard from work, holding me in his arms, wearing only a faded blue pair of underwear. It was like half of an enormous egg, with black felt inside.

I was twelve when I lost him.

I was twelve when I no longer knew how to hold pain in my hands.

The car battery was no preparation, the fervent prayers for my grandmother, not God, nor guilt.

I direct my anger towards you and your distance, but you could be anyone, and it always comes back to me. Am I angry at my impotence, at my inability to turn this rage into life? (Screaming his name in my mother’s arms in the middle of the night.)

Is it his beauty that makes it hard?

Is it his eyes that I see every time I look into a mirror, his body that I carry around with me, his hands that held those reigns the night he died, that move against this page as I write? Maybe it’s the love he felt for me, a crippled emotion in my body.

And so it is you I blame, you who have done nothing, you in your youth and your beauty, in your health and your joy of life, in your tentative expressions of attraction towards me I accept like live coals, holding only long enough for them to burn into my hands, before throwing them away.