Seventeen

It hasn’t been the same since they changed therapy rooms. She hasn’t been able to be anonymous and obsessively poet doodle, short tight bunches of truncated prose, ugly word combinations uttered in her head as the energy from the room swirls and colors and dissipates. She is afraid that she says too much. She is afraid she doesn’t say enough. She realizes talking is granting help just as much as listening. She makes the ugly brave request to talk about the abuse. To try to actively get to that part of the gigantic sore in the innards of her mind.

Do they always say innards? Never outards?

The week she asks for this discussion she leaves group shakily optimistic and somewhat regretful. While driving someone honks at someone and she is now in an aggressive driving situation. And that settles it. She has asked for trouble. She is now under attack. You see, he even controls the cogs of the universe, weaving the very loom of the fabric of fate itself.

Don’t tell, he knows, he knows. He keeps his promises.

He even finds a way to affect her lover’s behavior. She cleans up other messes too. She is the master of cleaning up messes, of walking on eggshells, even tap dancing on them. But the bad things keep multiplying and threatening to topple all her safe towers.

She is aware she shouldn’t need towers. But now, all her stuff is here.

A reprieve is granted and she gets another week to avoid the talk, avoid her own bringing on of pain, she has scraped herself till her ions are charged and magnetic, bringing the bad with her every attempt to be safe in a world she feels can only be UNSAFE, dragging around floating space garbage-like woe.

***.

The talk goes worse than she ever thinks it could go. The expected number when thinking about HIM, but an unexpected number for her lover.

This cannot be so and she is angry. She is not still a victim she is wrong and she is angry and the woman is wrong and group is wrong.

She thinks she can tell her lover, to prove them wrong. That his reaction would not be the angry unsure reaction of an abuser. She doesn’t think this man is an abuser. He is the abuser. She means was, she thinks to herself.

Unlucky seventeen.

Rule Fucker

I miss him and his body.
I only saw pictures. I only saw words. I only heard voice
of everyday prattle. Design
but so divine, so MINE.
The rules always fuck me.
One time, they will protect me.
Farcical fantasy,
man for me,
destiny.
The builder has been deconstructed.

No end to those who can live without me,
lonely little fuck rule
squeals me. Build me…

I want to say
what to the men who seem to know me…
Don’t desert me,
bereft please be
due to lack of me.

Something essential: fuck me or leave me.

See Me As You Were

You can pick one in this life.

You can pick one and have that one.

If something comes, if someone comes along, someone who is supposed to be yours, not your wife or husband, but YOURS, that’s different.
 
It’s hard for the one and for the one who receives the one.
 
How can you deny yourself me?
 
Shouldn’t you be SO proud I am yours, so proud someone so talented, smart, clever, loving is yours?
 
Shouldn’t that surrender feel like the biggest gift you could get?
 
You’ve tied my hands since.

We can’t talk about it, like what I need that you have given me and hold back from me now.

This is a death, over and over. I don’t know if I should walk away. I don’t want to. The list of things I want…
 
If I beg here, right here in public, Big Daddy, would you make it all better? Take me back? Tell me you love me and I’m your Baby Girl again?
 
Because I will. I will beg.
 
Please Daddy. Please. A million times please.
 
Know I do not want to replace your true love, know I don’t want to destroy all you have worked so hard for, know the two can exist.

We could have a healthy relationship of no consequence to your marriage.

You think you can just ignore this, that we can suffer thru with the chaste digital existence. That is not living. Denial.

Yes family is so important to you and I…mine…

Maybe you do see what I see or see me as never moving on and always demanding more.

This is not prayer, but a desperate plea that you see me as you were. 

You did love me.

A Thing Forever

I don’t feel like this is over. Or I do, but how can I go forward? I can only go to the side. Big Daddy still owns me.

He still owns me. I still wear his mark, so proud and even when we parted; it never ached and felt out-of-place. It feels right still, and it means I am still his.

I know when he designed my mark, he made it deliberately innocuous. He made it to signify to ME ALONE that I was his, but to the world it could look like it meant something else. And to him, in his head, I think he thought it meant something else too. Like he had tricked me into doing it, he appeased me without trapping himself.

We are speaking again, but it’s not easy. The waves of love still wash over, pound and crash. Like in life, he, so far from this sea and me, by the shore feeling all the pain. 

I miss his words and his encouragement. I miss him saying my name and I itch like a junkie to call him by his.

His demeanor hasn’t changed. It’s still the same Big Daddy, but we don’t discuss sex. We don’t discuss love and our relationship because all it is now is an empty kill-the-time friendship.

I don’t feel safe discussing my needs, the men in my life, my husband. I can’t tell him of my hurt places. They all hide behind the one, the place where I hurt for him.

God, I miss him so much.

And if I am only to be owned by him, then I become unrequited. He does not want the job, does not want me as his possession.

The worst, very worst part is he does not feel my loss. Just because he is ok doesn’t mean he doesn’t miss me, that’s what he said as we stumbled towards separation. That’s what he said. But how can he be ok? How can he not miss my obedience, support, love, and dirty mouth, willingness to give, give, and give?

I would throw myself at his feet now. I do not think there is anyone else. I want to beg and plead. I want to weep and scream. I want to kick and demand. I can HARDLY hold my tongue, please Big Daddy…

I am marked now. And despite all his attempts to protect me from permanence, he hasn’t.

Surprisingly, I’m not sad all the time. I have the Builder, who is so much more than Big Daddy ever was with his loving phone calls, emails, twitter. He is ever-present and so supportive and I have managed to not fall in love with him. But he isn’t dominant. There is no ownership. I can’t call him Daddy. It would feel wrong and inviolate to do so…

But my master is a Daddy. That’s the name I need to speak, that’s the love I need. Big Daddy had this love so easily flowing out of him, like 2nd nature. But no cell phone, no alone time, not even computer most of the time. He liked his limits, they protected him.

Or he never loved me.

How can I consider that a truth? But how else could he have cut me loose, carved me out, cut his losses? A simple quick swipe for him, and that connection was gone. For me, it has become a permanent binding, thick as the wrist that bears his mark, throbbing with vitality, pulsing with a life-long need for him. I have been waiting since birth for him. HE IS THE ONE.

I would still go back to him…

He just has to utter my name…

Never-NeverMan

I want to be at home, where I am happy about my true life. Just who do I think I am? Am I fooling myself into believing I am honest and true? Happy and sincere?

I am a wreck. My house is a wreck, my marriage is a wreck. I just want those moments with my lips against baby skin, or those moments where I prepare meals for them, answer their questions. I just want to be mom. It seems like the only thing I am sure of.

Since Big Daddy left I’ve been throwing myself into my family. Trying to, trying to remember my love in that slant, remember the past, which is something precious only he and I possess. And I cheapen it by wanting more, by wanting out when things get tough and stay tough. See? Even in writing this, I defend my actions.

Yes, we are open for reasons that don’t include falling in love with other people.

I have always been so eager to sell myself short, offer myself to any takers, regardless, saying I owed it to myself because I never had it before. Like mom says, if you don’t do something, sometimes you have to go back and do it.

Wish this whole mess had never started.

Loser

He is always losing something. His keys, his phone, his iPod, his license, his bank card, his hat, his work shirt. Honey, have you seen the keys? I can’t find my license. Where did those directions go? I lost my sunglasses.

When I was six months pregnant with my first daughter, he put the keys in my purse and promptly FORGOT. We didn’t check it until hours of looking later. At that point we had already contacted the dealer to order new keys. I had missed work. We had called my sister-in-law down from New Hampshire to drive us to GET the new keys and screamed at each other. A lot.

For years, it drove me nuts. I would set up key hooks. We tried a bowl. Nothing I could do, no habit to ingrain, no trick I could teach, no job I could assign could stop him from losing his shit.

Then, one day it just dawned on me in one of those freeing moments where a chunk of that chip on your shoulder that you never admit exists falls away and you breathe deeper than you thought possible. Things like that just happen to him. It’s just part of who he is. Loving him doesn’t including saving him from all pain and aggravation. And I shouldn’t expect him to change who he is. In surrendering to that, I noticed something really amazing.

He always finds what he thought was lost.

City of Sin

Delicate
Fish fry afternoon
45 minute walk on inferno cement
to polluted ocean
on flush town border

remember when it was just me and you
tripping on Jules coffee
in our ghetto love nest
with our oven-ette
and three cats?
 
Diamond district house paint fume war
Feet slap uneven sidewalk
Storefront ghosts,
like old tyme moth ball ladies
holding bedraggled
parasols against the aging sun

save 3 dollars for ice cream sandwiches
and debate the bus ride back to
the center of the lost land
minorities and poverties
in walmart flip-flops and expensive
cars parked in front of
matchbox apartments
 
carved from mansions of founding sea fathers
when the ocean was king
not the city
the ocean was king
fishing was king of money
and diamonds were bought with the blood of boats
sweat is also salty
 
leaving the cast offs now to reclaim
the elemental home as their own
 
we smelled the ocean every single day,
then the garbage, then the cooking oil
and back in out bed/couch with our bowl/solace
I’d make you dinner and
we’d swear there was nothing
better than two rooms of
our own and freedom
near the ocean.

Old Man

Did I try hard enough? Should I have tried harder to be his friend and that alone? GOD, I miss him. And in places and ways I have no right to. Not just during the times we would be together, but at home. Playing with the kids, thinking he might get a kick out of something, or my photographer’s eye, only there because of him, overactive, trying to please him.

I wonder if it’s true, that all I can do is be a little girl to his old man. I should be able to be his friend and that alone, but I don’t want to. I want to be his, his property. I want a daddy, one that loves me unconditionally and guides me. One I feel comfortable going to, one I am close to, one who makes it so clear that they are proud of me.

Am I mistaking fate with that desire? And if so, how hugely unfair to him…

I miss him.

Steady As Water

I hope he is ok. His routine, left unfulfilled yesterday, for all the world to see. This man, steady as water, as true as sky and tree. That I could upset this flow…I only beg I didn’t hold him too long. I sigh for the love we were allotted, as a gift well received for the work we did to get it.

I hope he is ok. I shouldn’t look, but I did. And will I continue to? I probably will.

I am writing more. Why do I feel like these are letters from somewhere small, where I have gone to heal? No, that’s not right. It’s a place I’ve gone to transform once again. I have to. I have to keep writing and living and raising my girls. I have to be married to my best friend and cultivate my family, because that’s the most important thing. It really is.

That’s What You Taught Me

Endless pictures
exist
that’s what you taught me
just like
mostly happily ever after.

The strength to do
bubbled up inside me.
No longer question
being worth it.
That’s what you taught me.
That’s what you taught me.

But worth you staying despite
your gentleman’s need
to always do the right thing.

There is no half way.
No uncertain.
That’s what you taught me.
No violation of loyalty.

Imperfections will be admitted.
Worries will be submitted.
Risks will be calculated and taken,
chalkboard numbers kept inside.

And while yes,
endless pictures exist,
yes, they do,
that’s what you taught me,
endless lives to live don’t.

The strong hurt.
The distant grow close.
The traditional emote.
The macho ache.
The older express.
The calm lash out.
That’s what you taught me.

Pride.
Love.
Safety.
Adoration.
Normalcy.
Patience, oh so much patience.
Hope.

Hope.
That’s what you taught me.