artichoke hearts
Happiest moments, happiest moments, happiest moments, I ponder. As if by repetition I will unlock some chemically hidden memories. I turn inward, seep deeply, and conjure up periods of stillness, of quiet. A feeling with a hazy picture attached, the details less important than the affect. My happiest moments being tucked in between the pages, when the fourth wall is broken, when the actor is on leave, when the set is shut down for the day. It is the sound of a page turning, the brushing of edge across center. It is a window slightly ajar, the lazy effort given for a half open window and the blurred lines of ownership and nature. It is your brow furrowed in juxtaposition to the rest of your body, splayed. The object of your intention, an orange. The warmth your focus brings me, the act of witnessing any emotion powerful enough to demand physical change. The tensing of muscles without conscious thought.
My happiest moments being the ones I pretend not to notice. The ones where my breathing slows and my movements halt and I try to remember how to love without suffocation. I always did play tentatively with my dolls. I find joy mostly in normalcy, in commonplace, in the moments that should be classified as mundane but instead are listed under magnificent. Who sets the parameters for the should anyway? Sitting on the couch, toes touching, reading. Sharing a blueberry pancake standing in the kitchen. The way your body brushes behind mine while I wash my face at night, your intended direction the bed we share. These moments that fit into life like the crook of your neck or the top of your head sliding under my chin. Despite the six inches you hold over me, my rightful place is on top. I was born to be a caretaker, a mother, a woman. Or, at least, the idea has been molded so indisputably into me throughout my whole existence that it is now woven deeply enough to feel organic. I enjoy feeling protective of you, ensuring my presence as a need, intertwining desire with necessity so when the former runs dry my ownership will be upheld by the latter.
And then there are the days I only want to exist underneath, to shrink behind your shadow, to feel the weight above me. I often take walks at dusk, when there is enough light reflecting off my skin to promise that I exist, but just enough darkness to necessitate internal life be placed upon the stage. I walk through the neighborhoods, observing, reminding myself it is much bigger than this. Much bigger than me. I could be content, I think, sitting outside watching life through your window. I intentionally line my breath with yours, hoping to annex myself, tired of being my own piece. Alice visits me in my waking dreams, and I consider searching for the rabbit hole. I envy her escapism. I wake up wanting to be small, to be forgotten, to be invisible, to be known by only one. I remember that my love isn’t altruistic and the sacrifices I self impose for you are anything but congenial and I beg you to stay and lay directly on top of me for fear of floating away. I am desperate for your touch to remind me of my existence and ask, if you leave who will test the legitimacy of my fingertips? And feed me goldfish from the bowl and make me elbow pasta for dinner and stroke the words over and over again into my soul that I am all real and this is all here.
And who will soothe my wails once I’ve eaten the fish, or the elbow, or the fingerling, or the heart, and I swear I can taste their blood stained on my bones and their pulse within my throat. And, that part isn’t real you say it’s just a name but who’s to say and how am I to know which is wrong and which is right and which is living and which is dead and you say people wouldn’t sell hearts in cans to be eaten like an artichoke but isn’t that what I've been doing my whole life? Trying to sell myself for the nourishment of others and I have almost certainly been eaten before so how can you tell me there isn’t a girl or a man or a fish three thousand miles away under a tree or a bed or in the arms of her mother or her lover shattered, shaking, and missing her heart.
With a hole in her chest and her muscles stuck between my bones.
