The office lights don’t work right and
it’s cramped so
I am sitting too close to you as you
tell me that last night she
slammed your hand in your car door and
broke three fingers on your right hand and
you are asking me how to get
temporary disability accommodations
as you can’t write your women’s studies paper.
This is not political
I am not on a diet
I am not hungry
If I was hungry, it wouldn’t matter
Three apples is more than enough for the day
This is not political
This isn’t what you think it is
This is a new way of eating. I am smarter than those sick girls
I am not as thin as you think I am
I am not sad
I am not scared
This is not about anything but the island of fat under my navel
This is not political
This is not political
This is not political
This is not political.
I put fingers in my mouth because you don’t. In the jury box, my tongue twined around my knuckle, stuck in traffic in my brokedown Honda with licking the pink V between my fingers. Too late at night, I sit at home with the six televisions blaring (these days, I can’t get enough noise. these days, I can’t get enough anything) and give myself hickeys on the pads of my fingers.
The people who used to come by used to tell me, with an air of alarmed disapproval, that it was all too goddamn much. No one, they told me, needs twenty couches. No one but me needs eight indoor lime tree, a stuffed gazelle, a wall of canned tomatoes, a chiffarobe overflowing with condoms, a dining room waist deep in decaying larkspur and sunflowers.
The locks on all my bathroom doors don’t work anymore. Back in the oldest days, when you used to take showers at my place -
(here is a short list of things you used to do. wear green scarves. pet other people’s dogs. eat avocados with no silverware. Breathe on my neck after you kissed it.
here is a short list of things you used to care about. your personal safety. hygiene. my feelings. me)
-I would bang on the locked door. You always half listened to my monologues about the distance between us and how I was already forgetting what you looked like. We both knew that wasn’t true and I’ve got the mountains of print photo albums to prove it. And I remember how I would finally give up and jimmy the lock with a butter knife and how I would sit in the sink and talk a million miles an hour about things that only made sense to us. We constructed our own world, with fjords and suburbs, blueberry bushes and microclimates. Mostly importantly, our own dialect, unrelated to any other (not even Basque, my darling).
Now its July and I’ve got the air conditioning on high enough to kill all the orchids and I sit here drinking gallons of hot cocoa and thinking: this isn’t fucking right.
I used to be the responsible one. My Phd is from Reed. I graduated summa cum laude. But I think the diploma got lost in all this breakdown and now they won’t hire me to drive school buses. You played the fuck up for our theater production we called a relationship (do you remember the time we argued about whether I should call you my lover, my partner, my significant other, my fuckbuddy? I do. {i hold our memories inside of my ribcage like a malignant tumors. my heart is beating itself to death}). You were the mess of things that you wanted, and you dodged consequences like the slipstream.
You used to wait for me in all the airports. You’d watch me walk away in my pantsuit that you got to get off me, wave goodbye. Hop a connection to St. Louis. Take the Concorde to London, just to keep waving goodbye over and over and over and over.
You used to have days were you’d collect everything you saw that was my favorite color; dropping stop signs, knitted baby’s jackets, bricks pried up from the street, coke cans, stolen snippets of hair into my lap like a pleased cat.
I’d find you charting the atmospheric conditions at the moment of my birth, and making sketches of the possible bluebird skies I might have seen. You’d laugh at the sunrise like you’d been up all night, and you never did find that shade of cerulean, did you?
Now? I give myself everything but what I want. I must’ve swallowed your sickness whole, like the chimerical twin I devoured before birth. It lives under my skin and wears me like a glove (and to think I used to be four fingers deep in you). This thing is my puppet master and it more than moves me my days and nights. I am the seat of all unrest. I swear to God, I used to sleep.
I am not at all picky. Drive thrus are always surprised as they haul bags of fries, mounds of hamburgers, puddles of chocolate-strawberry-vanilla-swirl milkshakes to my car. I am huge, but my want is vast.
Before all this breakdown, I used to say no. I budgeted. There was a blue day planner. Sometimes, I went to bed early. Now, in these days of catastrophe, I lie in my bed until the dead hours of the night eating endless sour candies until my mouth is blistered and weeping.
(I remember your brown eyes dilated until just a ring of color showed. Though the library in my heart is a catalogue of regret and methadone and hotlines that didn’t work, there is one thin book of thanks for the blackness of your eyes that night)
I am learning to love absence like a wife. If I am going to have anything, I am going to have all of it, so I’ve poured concrete over all the windows and stuck spearmint gum in the doorknobs. I am learning what it is to be alone. God, I’m so good at it, and I never realized how much stillness could hurt before now. This stillness means that my story doesn’t move. I live in loops that beat at forty strokes per minute, same as petting a cat or a womb after orgasm. My narrative is twisted around your finger like how you used to twirl your hair as you smoked American Lights. Canon can go to hell. These days, I get what I don’t want and I don’t want you to know what really happened. Truth is a weapon and my stitches aren’t healed yet.
So believe this:
I think Salinger was writing about you -She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together- the night I met you, except we were in line at Registration.
You took my History of Logic class and I failed you for handing in a response to “What is sense?” that read “What you and I make together. Duh.”
You were all twitches and haggard insouciance and so assured of your superlatively bad taste that I had to talk you out of donning a fetishwear latex gown to meet the Queen of Denmark.
You had plans for the end of the world, and it depended on whether it ended in light or blood.
You were surprisingly good at arcade games, whack a mole particularly.
You thought you looked like an Orthodox Jew. You didn’t. Your elbows sucked. You listened to Barry Manilow. Your veins were collapsed. You got the gist of the trick called living, but oh, oh, the niceties were hell.
To want is to build hollow worlds, to write novels composed of ink blotches and scratches. I am fruitless. I’m sorry I wasted your time.
I wrote this as advice for the students at my old middle/high school. If I could, I would include a lot more safer sex info.
hello and good morning,
My name is Colleen Kimsey. I graduated from VSAA in 2009. I was in literary arts focus for two years with Jennifer Hockhalter (Czarina Mommy Bunny), had six advocates and the good luck to wind up with Judy Goff. I started the VSAA gayANDstraight Club wehavesnacks, Day of Silence, The Anime Club, and the Poetry Out Loud Competition.
I am asking all of you for a certain kind of sit-upful awakefulness that is so hard to generate in the public school system sometimes
I need you to listen like your real life starts now, not when you graduate, not when you think you have found the person who will hold your shaking heart steady and not when you stop arguing with your mother.
Listen, because I have literally been exactly where you have, I have slumped in those seats, I sat on the red on the first day of senior year with my best friends because it was packed full to bursting with our fresh dresses and hope and ideas.
That’s rare. I want you to know that.
Listen! I am going to give you some advice because I think advice giving is a forgotten art, much like tatting lace or making apple butter. Believe me now, or believe me later, but listen.
Don’t be so afraid, for a start. Things will go wrong and things will continue. I have a friend who jumped off a train and crinkled her scalp like taffeta, but she healed. There are fewer catastrophes than you imagine.
Never interfere in a girl and boy fight.
Stay hydrated.
Don’t know everything. You probably don’t understand conventional English sentence construction, post WWII Soviet politics, how to tip in a restaurant as well as you think you do. Ask.
Spend less time on the internet. Learn how to make seed bombs instead and deploy them in vacant lots until you live in a city occupied by wildflowers.
Being loved will solve less than you think it will. Plan accordingly.
Move through the world as if you owe everyone around you a great debt, which you do.
Know that this is a good place. You will walk the floors of ten thousand places where you aren’t valued and respected as much as you are here. Don’t waste that. Don’t confuse being resentful about having to go to school with this school in particular.
Don’t wear clothes ironically.
Stay hydrated. Put your wallet and phone in the same place every day. I am not kidding about this in any way, shape or form.
There are ways out of any entrapment. Nothing is forever. I can’t promise this, but in my life’s cumulative review so far, everything gets better. Trust that.
This part is for the girls, because I had about ten brave boys in my graduating class and I suspect the demographics can’t possibly change that much that fast:
Your beauty is worth less than you would imagine. Don’t take that to mean you are not beautiful, which you all are in the way all the young and smart and radiant are beautiful. It is just that your beauty has much less currency in the world than your wit, your fierce intelligence, your knowledge of java programming. Plan accordingly.
Less blush, more lipstick.
Stay hydrated.
This part is for the baby gays, because nobody ever talks to you about the things you need to hear.
It’s fine. It’s okay. It’s really okay. It will get less interesting with time.
If it is not okay, you owe your life
Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t deserve just as level a starting line as anyone else. Don’t let them use any book or bias to tell you that you are not perfect, whole and normal.
There is less of a playbook for who holds who’s hand, who pays for the pad thai takeout, how to kiss and dress and behave. Write your own through living.
Don’t try suicide. Don’t even mess around with the little deaths and don’t kid yourself that thin red lines you drew with a straight edge on your inner thighs and secret nooks of your body aren’t an engraved invitation for the ending to come sooner. Ask for help. Stick through the process called healing. It’s worth it, I promise, for the milky way, and the icy air in October and the way your darling’s belly will feel pressed against your own.
Listen, to learn all of this I have had to travel to a place where sunsets light up the smog the way a forest fire lights up a night sky. Let’s make a trade, okay? I’ve given you this, all this, so you don’t have to learn everything the cobblestone and concrete way. I’ve learned all this through the nights I choked on my own snot and my own hysterical sorrow, through ex-girlfriends and ex-friends. Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
Trade me all this for your new mistakes. Fail for me in foreign and exotic ways, as unexpected as the feral parrots in San Francisco. When you bust out of this hothouse racetrack, I want you to be as resplendent as a quetzal, as unsheltered as an obelisk. Invent new failures. Commit to making movement. Burn, burn brightly, make some noise, make people sit up and listen, be a source of light and beauty and energy in the world. Come back. Tell me how it goes.
Thank you.
