A Goodbye

I'm sorry
I'm sorry my heart was not
Forged from the same tendons as yours
You deserve better
I'm sorry your flowers will droop
Beneath the weight of my betrayal
Under every time I lied
When I said that I loved you
I'm sorry
You deserve someone who will love you
With their whole heart, in its imperfect entirety
Who will dance through downpours with you
Who will hold you like you hold them
Like you held me
I'm sorry I was not meant for you
But you were meant for someone
And they will find their way to you
I'm sorry

Dreams

I think it's because when we were children
Lips smeared with chocolate cake
And sidewalk chalk
We used to dream about these experiences fervently
As if the more time we spent
Playing them out behind our
Closed eyelids like silent movies
The more reachable they became
And now we've grown up and
We're on the threshold of actually living them
It's hard to accept that with real beauty come real flaws
And it takes courage
To relinquish the perfect dreams of childhood
And to accept life in all its imperfections
But when we do
We open ourselves to the possibility
Of living out that silent movie
In full colour
And with the most beautiful music
Playing behind our sidewalk chalk silhouettes

And Though

I feel your heart

Beat in my hands

And though my soul should despise my head

And though the rain echoes your eyes

And though in all facets of life

I should clasp you tight

I find my mind trespasses my hands

And my lips no longer craving yours

How could love grow to shrivel and die

Carcass easily blown aside

I must be scarred with such ugly knolls

To not love someone like you

But what is love with no desire?

What is heat

Without a fire?

Stella

          Stella May Spelling was a pearl-wearing, flapper-dress loving, Charleston-dancing, all-around all-american twenties girl. Her mother was a seamstress, who, having failed fashion school, resorted to sewing other people’s big ideas. She hated it. Her father was an investment banker, who wore scary round spectacles and was constantly polishing them. Stella never liked her father, and neither did Stella’s mother, so the two of them spent hours in her mother’s room at her vanity, brushing each other’s hair and daydreaming about possible other fathers of Stella.

            Stella’s greatest fear in life was to be like her parents. Her mother was hollow and heart-broken, always waiting for some superman to sweep her away, to rescue her from her eternal life of washing dishes until her hands dissolved into the grimy soap and doing laundry until she ironed herself into a shrivelled up corpse. Her father was bored and dull and only talked algebraically. Stella was a dancer, and she danced through everything. She danced like the world was ending and she danced with everything that she had. Her skin was smooth and fair, like ivory piano keys that seemed to be draped like cake fondant over her delicate bones and dance-conditioned muscles, which were just strong enough to support her as she span and jumped and kicked but never got in the way of her doll-like appearance.

            John was the first and only boy that Stella ever loved. They met at a dinner party on Christmas eve, 1923. Stella was seventeen, and John was a twenty-year-old from New York, sweeping into her hometown of Boston with such an air of life experience that Stella was immediately under his spell.

“I’m John,” He murmured in his deep, throaty voice.

“John what?” Stella asked, her eyes holding questions.

“Just John. John from New York City.” Her heart leaped. A mysterious, older, handsome New Yorker? Her night was made.

“Stella,” She held out her hand to him, her pearl bracelets clinking. She thrust her champagne glass at an already loaded waiter and he took her hand, pulling her onto the dance floor, his hand around her tiny waist.

During their final dance, as the music swelled and their hearts beat faster, he lifted her above his head by her hips, and she arched her back as she span around, dizzied by champagne and twinkling fairy lights. When her satin-clad feet touched back down on the ground, she breathed in deep, and their eyes met. The kiss that followed was unlike any that Stella had experienced before. It was giving, respectful, but eluding and inviting. Stella, her dignity to protect, pulled away. John’s hand brushed her cheek and traced her arm, dropping something in her hand.

As his back retreated into the crowd, Stella looked at the paper in her palm. Her eyes read the ink, unbelieving. She read it and re-read it and re-read it, digesting, spitting out the information, and digesting it again. She moved to follow him but her breath caught in her chest, and she stopped.

Stella moved out from under the huge marquee that the party was being held in. June air filled her lungs and she stared at the moon that was rising over the blue lake and illuminating the dark sky. Stars twinkled at her and made her tears shine like rounded diamonds as they wet her cheeks. She brushed at them out of reflex, not really caring who saw them.

She looked up at the sky. Her eyes found the moon, and the face that was projected on it like a film projector. It was his, in all its perfection. His hair even moved in the breeze and as she raised a hand towards it, he winked. She climbed the railing overlooking the lake, her shoes abandoned, her feet feeling the cold metal and the rain from last night. She leaped off that railing like an angel in flight and she didn’t look down, she believed she was flying as her body was suspended, and she felt herself rising up, past the clouds and the atmosphere. The sky darkened as she entered the vast emptiness that was space and her fear was quieted when she neared the moon, her hands intertwining with his and her body pressed against his, for he was a part of the moon and she melted into him, their figures eternally embraced on the surface of the grey moon rock.

Back on the ground, her best friend, Emma, stooped to pick up a piece of paper she had found near the railing overlooking the lake. Her eyes read it, confused, and then her eyes found the lifeless silhouette of a body floating on the lake. The figure was wearing the dress that Stella had been wearing moments at ago at the party, Emma was sure of it. She screamed as the realization hit her, as she came to know that Stella was floating, dead, on the lake below, some couple hundred meters of a fall.

She looked again at the note, tears that weren’t Emma’s smearing the ink.

I was only an illusion.

I Can't Remember

I can’t remember the details. Remember. A word with too many meanings and too much pain attached to its skeleton frame. Remembering is a butterfly word with its wings snapped off because remembering is static. Remembering is paralyzing, and remembering is too much of a bad thing. No, I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to remember the suffocating silence, his blinding white sterile heart, wiped clean with Comet and dried under a volcano. I don’t want to remember the way he looked at me, his dark eyes a reflection of a million storms. No, I don’t want to remember. I think I’ll stick to watching Gossip Girl re-runs and darting my eyes between the pages of the glossy magazine I’m holding.

I glance down at my nails, frozen, grasping the magazine like a life raft. Bitten like a summer strawberry, my nails are a reflection of my personality, a symbol in my life, as my English teacher would say. This fleeting thought transports me to that day last November. The sky was a mottled array of grey and white hues, like an artist had gone completely insane, Picasso-insane, and decided to paint the sky a depressing mix of sad and sadder. I remember noticing that sky when I woke up. I remember glancing down at the indentation in my bed where he had lain. I remember feeling the cold hardwood floor under my bicep when I woke up to that dark sky.

I walked slowly to my mirror, I was a deer walking on a thin sheet of ice and what I was about to see could startle me and cause the ice to break. Snap. Like my heart. So slowly, I placed myself, eyes closed, in front of my mirror, like I do every night after he’s been here. I position my hands over my eyes. One by one, I lifted my fingertips from their places just above my eyebrows, where I felt it, throbbing. I let them slowly fall from my face, and I stared at myself in the mirror, once again entranced and horrified by what I saw. There it was, clear as a summer day. Anyone would be able to recognize what it meant. But apparently no one I knew was anyone. The purple, red, and black crescent shape bordered my right eye like some careless child’s colouring. The pen hadn’t stayed in the lines, and the colours all blurred together. The bruise was the sky outside- mottled, dark, and sad. Sad and sadder. I remember painting over the unsightly painting on my face with my worn-down concealer stick. I remember the pain of its pressure, how it felt good. How it took my mind off what I had to face today. Him. I remember being half-satisfied at my work, at my careful blending of creams and powders and lotions to make the big, fat, ugly blotch go even half away. I remember not looking at anybody when I walked downstairs, up the street, and into school. I remember finally lifting my eyes from the cheap linoleum floor when I sat down at my desk in my Grade 11 English class. I remember staring at you right in your bright blue eyes when you handed me my homework back from last week. I remember willing you to notice the blue behind the beige, I remember staring at you so intently, hoping that you would finally notice. But all you said when you saw me staring at you was “Good writing, Amber,” as you set down my essay with a big plop on my desk. I remember staring at the big, fat A in red marker on the first page. I remember wanting to scream and throw it at you because it reminded me of dried blood. I remember.

But that is all I remember, all I ever will remember, I think, as I sit here on this couch in front of my flat screen TV, reading a glossy magazine and slowly picking the mascara off my eyelashes, like picking the wings off the butterfly word, remembering. I sit here, sipping six dollar green tea out of a twenty dollar mug, my new bruise throbbing with an almost gentle persistence under my newly-replaced thirty dollar concealer and powder from the Sephora across the street. Of course it has to be the thirty dollar kind, the kind that should say: “Hides perfectly all bruises, marks, and scars from abusive boyfriends” on the label in pink, flowing script. Of course my mom or the lady behind the counter at Sephora should notice that I am buying so much makeup all the time. I haven’t had more than one monthly pimple since I was thirteen. What would I need concealer for, other than for hiding battle scars?

But my mom is too busy click clacking in her two inch black patent leather pumps down the oncology ward of the hospital, fighting back her own tears as she dries the tears on my little brother’s dying cheeks. Yes, she’s too busy with her corporate job and her cancer-poisoned child to notice me, her straight-A daughter with an affinity for abuse. I’m just a six-o’clock on her weekly agenda, a ‘hi, honey, how are you,’ met with the same lie every day, every single day. ‘I’m fine.’

Kyle is what I deserve. When he’s not inflicting pain he’s apologizing profusely, begging on his knees that I will stay. He makes the cut then transforms into the band-aid covering it; he causes my tears then dries them frantically. Some people cut, starve, binge, purge or drink. But that’s a punishment that they inflict on themselves, something they control. They get to play god, they get to decide when they’re guilty. Kyle decides that for me. It’s what I repeat to myself over and over and over and over again until it’s so engrained in my head that I believe every word of it. That this is what I deserve.

At night, I wait. Every night I wait for him to knock on my window. I wait for him to lower himself into my bed after I slide the window pane silently open. I wait for the numbness to take over as he begins doing what he has done for the last three years of my life. Fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, all spent in terror of his wrath. Imagine how much money I could have saved if I didn’t have to buy a new thirty dollar concealer every month for three years of my life. But everything else, I block out.

No, I don’t want to remember. Remembering is a butterfly word with its wings snapped off because remembering is static. Remembering is paralyzing, and if I don’t have to remember, I don’t want to. I’d rather lie under this canopy of mottled gray sky, remembering the reasons why I shouldn’t remember.

Remember

Sometimes the sadness curls up

Right inside that hollow part of me

You know the one

Maybe it’s been there all along or maybe we cultivated it

Somewhere along the way with sidewalk chalk and crushed butterflies

All I know is I am gasping here

All I know is sometimes, all the lights turn off and the glow in the dark stars reveal everything I had tried to forget everything

Everything that plays and skips in my mind like the vinyl in the record player

All the sadness

All those crushed butterflies and tragic moments and sad faces and taught eye skin

Clenched for tears

Tight lipped delivery of bad news, every rainy day every spilled coffee

Every failure every time I have ever been broken

Sometimes

Everything piles up like a library of blackness and it’s hard

It’s hard to remember the sun, the stars, the smiles pulling at the corners of my lips

The blush, the butterflies, the beauty of her eyes

Sometimes it’s easy to forget

Sometimes all I can see is the way you looked at me, the way you knew and I didn’t, the way you were poised to tell me

The way I came home to find you heaped, curled on the sofa

The way every inch of life was drained from your eyes

The way you surrendered to loss like flame to breath

The way the sorrow washed over us, disbelief dripping from my eyes sometimes

Sometimes that sorrow flies back to me and it’s hard to remember

The feel of her skin, the feeling of being alive

The electricity that means I’m still fighting

Sometimes I forget

But all I need from you is to hold me until I remember

Help me remember

Breathe

And maybe when this storm has passed

When ships have sailed and long left my stormy seas

Maybe when the ghost of you

Has been washed and rinsed from my memory

Maybe when I’m far away

Over seas and mountains and tall tall trees

Maybe once you learn to breathe

You won’t need to steal the air from me