The seventh day

I don't know what an ending feels like,

and that's because I've never let myself

feel one - I learned in school that

on the seventh day God rested 

and if someone as omnipotent 

as him can catch a break then surely

it should be easier than this
but if you never stop going
maybe you'll forget where you started -

maybe you'll forget
that there was something before
this migraine of a memory at all

and man, I think I just need some time
I wish I could crawl in between
the spaces where calm hides

but maybe those spaces
are a worn out CD on a rainy day,
a t-shirt so old you forget where you got it;

maybe they're you:
your run-on sentences
and how you remind me of Christmas hearths

or they're the plume of a Virginia cigarette
or realizing that every home is new
before it's old

and to be honest, I'm sure that
in the same way that the universe
moves us all towards each other painfully slowly,

I am moving too: the saltwater
in my eyes is not the sting of an ending
but the painful wash of gravity,

the tide that nudges me along
and I'm sure I've seen God resting
in the moments when you brush my lips

and I pray to the church that
gave me these nostalgic butter fingers:
always losing grip on the people I used to be

but I wonder that when you ask
a chicken where its egg came from
if it will reply

even though it knows the answer.

Reconciliation

I remember a time before.

I remember it because I keep going back to it, like a squirrel who stored nuts for the winter; but also like a squirrel who stored nuts for the winter, it takes me a little while to find the place again. She kept me warm on the most unexpectedly cold days. She listened to the water that poured out of me on the rainy days and she listened well because she understood me. We were alike, but as much as two people joined by the word "stepmother" could be. I loved Christmas. I loved wearing the sweaters she gave me every year to wear to Christmas dinner and I remember a time before I had to go cry in the bathroom, wiping my runny nose on the sleeve of the sweater that I didn't really like that much anyway. Before arguments that don't involve me. Before arguments that do involve me. Before grief of something I lost that claims it has found itself.

What mattered in this time was that she cleaned up blood that didn't match hers when I scraped my knee. That she kept extra tampons in the bathroom for me. That the meals she made became my favourite meals. I could always have a hug when I needed it, and hot toddies cured me only when she made them. I remember this time, this time before I had a tendency to gather every bad experience I had with her into one giant garbage mass that casts a shadow over everything. Before I realized that your acceptance of the bad in a person has limits. Before I realized that surprise isn't quite the right word and wondered why I felt it. Before I had to experience another divorce in my life. My world went from the back of a penny to the whole cobblestone street in the ten years I knew her and my pocket still rattles with the change she slipped into it.

In the darkest times, when nothing seemed to join us, the one common denominator was that we both loved my father. Now, someone has turned out the lights and there is no emergency lantern. There is no common denominator. I can't even use that anymore; I cast out a tattered line and it goes slack as it slumps to the floor a few hundred feet away. I will never stop loving my father, and as long as that is true, I will never stop falling downwards into this black hole with the garbage mass looming above me. I remember a time before I understood the elusiveness of reconciliation, that sometimes you just can't go back to a time before the damage. Now, words dance on my lips and letting them loose would make me too sick, but the staccato of their feet is nauseating. That Marie Antoinette of a time, before I hated the taste of cake, before Christmas ornaments made me angry, before I learned how to unlove someone.

There is no reconciliation in unloving someone. There is no before, or after. There is just dark, before you look down and see your own light burning holes through the shadows.

Teach me something

I'm not sure if it's their wet grins or their fingers that curl into the shape of a gun trigger but some people seem to camp rent free so easily in other's hearts. I am no exception to any rules but I have stopped blaming myself for doing what I could, for sometimes being less outspoken than I should have been, and for surviving the way I do. Just because you managed to get your tongue down my throat does not mean that I am easy. I am not easy because I have instead learned to be easy on myself when I'm not strong enough to do the right thing. I have learned that when Ferris tells you life goes by pretty fast, you should listen to him and take a look around.

Tell me about your favourite movie, teach me about what makes you laugh and what makes you cry. As Stephen King said, we all look the same when we're puking the gutter. So tell me you're not afraid to see what's at the bottom, because we all do at some point. Let's be easy on ourselves when one of us overwhelms the other but let's not forget that we both know what goes unsaid, because the difference between being lonely and being alone is the look in someone's eyes.

When someone tells you they love you, believe them. If you're too afraid to believe someone else's heart then you're too afraid to believe your own. If you want the world to be easy on you, be easy on yourself. When a soft breeze runs through your hair, ask it to teach you something because as much as it hurts to be wrong, it hurts more to beat yourself up for something that the world has already punished you once for. Be more like my grandmother, who dresses the alter at her church with beautiful flower arrangements for every mass, and dresses her own home the same, as if her foyer is an alter for coffee gossip and crossword puzzles. Take down the bouquets every season and replace them with new ones but don't forget that you will never learn without being gentle with yourself, that bees prefer to rest on a soft bed of pollen before going off to work.