I Was Never Much One For Revisionist History

14 January, 2004 6:37 p.m.

I can't really tell you what I was thinking when I threw my weight down on the bathroom tiles and hugged myself, a roll of toilet paper in my hand. Half wounded, half angry, I hugged myself, stewed. Well, fuck you too, I was thinking, and also something about the crazy kettle calling the crazy pot black. But mostly, I just wanted to feel his arms around me like that time last New Years, first time he saw me cry, first time he dabbed snot off my upper lip, held me, said "It'll be ok."

I just wanted to know that it would be ok.

Well, I got up, stared at myself in the mirror and my face looked swollen and sore, so goddamned tired of crying. And I went to him and I held him because I needed to feel sure of something, and I couldn't wait for him to feel that for me. I said, I love you, but for a moment I hated him too for every cancelled plan and every time his voice got that flat, dry tone and he said to me, life's not fair, don't you agree that i'm right? I hated him for all the times I was or he wasn't or all that anger I'd submerged. I hated him for making me a crazy girlfriend.

We fumbled, our hands around one another, our skin still-sticky. "So sorry" was all he said. His shoulders were soft through his t-shirt. My mind had become an island away from my body, connected only by a silver string. My body had become a machine concerned with our shallow breath, a chorus, and holding his body against mine.

this is the boy i've told all my secrets. this is the body that knows that songs that i cried about when I was sixteen, knows all about the fathers, and the lights in the distance. this is the boy that sings my body electric. this is the girl that has trouble letting go of memories. prolonged catharsis of emotion.

"So sorry."

And just like that, I let it go (/all/of/it/).

We pushed our faces together until I couldn't breathe. His constricted lungs moved for both of us. Sometimes, our hands intertwined. When I said that I was sorry, then I meant I was sorry for ever feeling like a shadow, for letting my body talk and cry and letting the rest of me float around the room like I was watching a movie, a black and white movie. For thinking that it was beautiful to be fragile. For thinking that time was sand, and you were only a grain. Or something.

We peeled off our clothes like we were shedding caccoons, found ourselves the way moths light, the way flesh finds a body, the way soul(?) finds truth.

And there might be something better than being right. And that might be being true.



previous next

twice sixteen - 14 January, 2016
Hey--what's going on? - 11 April, 2008
I wasn't cool - 30 July, 2004
something you wouldn't believe if you saw it. - 11 May, 2004
Going to 17th and U - 27 April, 2004

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