Here's a secret guys: I wouldn't know what happy was if it walked up and slapped me on the ass. I don't even know what happy is supposed to look like, or what it makes it. I've spent 24 years seeking happy and so far, I haven't found it. I've sought it in the country, in the city, in a bed, in a kayak, in a pool, in an engine, in a blue sky, in the rain and in the bottom of a bottle. I still haven't found it, no matter where I look. I'm a believer in very few things, and one of them is that some of us can't be happy. At an early age, I developed abandonment issues because I never had a pet that stayed, because my sister was my best friend until she moved out and I never saw her again at the ripe age of 6. I spent too much time asking why; I still do. I don't understand anything, so I spend too much time thinking about things that I can't answer, ergo, I try my best not to think at all. I do my best to just duck my head and let people pretend that I'm happy, that I'm smiling for real, that there isn't a tattoo on top of the scars to remind me that we can't all be everything we're supposed to be; and then modify that to be that some of us just aren't. We all have scars, but how we cope is much different. I'm sitting at a keyboard, waiting on a call back, on a text, on anything tonight. At this point, I don't even know what it is I'm waiting for. I'm just waiting. I can't believe, if you'd have asked me in 2008, that my purpose in life would be to wake up and go to work 9 days out of 14. That I would know 6 people in a city and be alone more often than I'm with people. It feels so empty. I wish I could fill it with god, with yoga, with running, with people, with drugs or with sunshine. It isn't so. It just remains a void with no end.
There is a reason my body creaks like a closing casket every time I fuck with the lights left on. It is the same reason my friend sets fire to photographs of birds and follows the smoke with pleading eyes. We've both had years when the Phoenix didn’t rise, when we slept in beds of cindered feathers and held hollow ashen beaks the way the other kids hold ice cream cones. I suck the bones of a songbird’s rotting wings and you think your pills are going to fix me, doctor? You think I’m going to chase this down with water? The shame as loud as his next girl’s nightmares. I tied my tongue like a ribbon in my baby sister’s hair, like a bow around a gift I gave to my mother and father and my silence equaled every Christmas morning we were still happy and grateful, but my silence was also his next girl’s eyes, fallen like timber when no one chose to hear her roots ripped up, her ground eroding to the din of an old man’s zipper. 20 years later I wake in damp sheets, my body trembling to the ghost of her voice cracking like a frozen lake and I don’t even know her name. I never saw her face. Only heard the rumor that he moved on to the hemorrhage of another perfect thing, And now here I sing through cinder, through microphones raised like white flags in war zones, through poems dug from my throat like fishing hooks from pier. I look back at my voice lowered to half mast, how he must have stood there with his dirty hand on his dirty heart laughing like a broken levy as his next girl woke with body bags beneath her eyes and enough shame in her gut to give the hurricane her own name. If I could see her face, if I could face the eye of her storm, how would I ever tell her that I speak for a living? Would I offer my own wounds as condolence? Would I say his claws carved me animal? Would I say at 14 years old I threw my bloody fist into my boyfriends face ‘til his eye swelled shut and his tears turned crimson and his jaw cracked, ‘til I was finally convinced his hands were not every man’s hands? Would I tell her I have stood beneath street lamps waiting for the swarming flies to identify my body as carcass, to swallow every cell of salt and leave nothing behind but the trellis of my untouched bones? I remember the fault line in the corners of his eyes, the way he shook hands with my father, the look on his face beneath the swollen sun, even his shadow looked guilty. The concrete made crime scene by his touch. Would I tell her this? Would I ask if she has ever outlined her own body in chalk? Is there yellow tape in your top dresser drawer for the night when your true love’s kiss is an anthem to a dead country, and you find yourself with rope burns around your neck, begging the bodies of stranger to not respect you in the morning? In the morning I shovel my blood from the white snow. I wipe my frantic breath from the window and I bind my breasts so that something will hold my breath so tight not even the air in my lungs could be identified as woman. Woman are you a carbon copy of myself? Is there a boy inside you painting yourself with the cells of charcoaled feathers? So you will never again glow in the dark the way girls do? Woman if I knew your name, if I could face the eye of your storm in the warning locked in my voice box that never came would I tell you all of this and after that would I find the nerve to admit that even if I could I wouldn't take my silence back? My father owned a gun. He would have blown that man apart. My mother owned a mother’s heart. Everything would have broken, everything but you.
