in the middle of the night

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"And in the end, we were all just humans...  Drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald



help me uproot this sickness, mama.  help me get it up and out.  stick out your hand and i'll spit it out like a piece of stolen candy.  i'll tip my head back, mama, and i'll open wide.  you can reach in with both hands and a bar of soap and wash all the badness out.  lean over me, hold me back by my hair and spill your prayers of healing all over my face, pour them down my throat, find any antiseptic at all that will bubble and burn and dissolve the horrible lesson, the horrible, horrible lesson that the love of another can save or fix a fucking thing.

it is no solid gold you taught your daughters and son to chase, mama.  it is no bronze or unbreakable steel.  the insidious craving you cultivated in your children eats us from the inside out. 

the definition of love we were taught is absolutely fucked.


you first husband didn't even call his children when he learned of your death.  didn't even send an email. and so that door will remain forever closed.

your second husband, not even three years later, is remarried (again) to his fourth wife and refuses to have anything to do with your children whom he helped raise for 15 years.  the awful joke of the situation is that, if you weren't already dead, mama, this shit would kill you.

even the man you encouraged me to marry didn't go to your funeral.  and when i came home, spirit ripped in half after seeing you whittled down to your skeleton by cancer, burned to dust and plugged in to a small silver heart on a chain and put in to my hand...  i looked at the man who claimed to love me, who said i was the most beautiful girl in the world, mama, the man who said i was his perfect fit...  i looked at him and i told him that i hurt so bad, felt like i was dying too.  i tried to explain to him how it felt to see your own mother's dead body wheeled out of the house through the kitchen on a gurney and my grandfather, your daddy, shouting in your ear, "We love you Nisey! We love you Nisey!", a minister who believes the soul escapes the body and ascends to heaven the very second of death...  i tried to explain what it felt like to watch this, a father shouting in to his own child's dead ear that he loves her, despite and against his own beliefs, in the horror-driven hope that she could hear him...  that she was still in there somewhere.  that you were still in there somewhere, mama.  behind sunken eyes and a hollow face.  the only word i could find that even came close to describing how i felt was Homeless...  i felt robbed and thrown aside and refused.  my only real home, my other body, the womb in which i grew, the soft pink which gave me warmth and root was gone...  and in that moment of total devastation and confused horror, all i wanted was to be fucked.  i wanted to be fucked as hard as possible.  i needed to feel something other than this immense horror,  this total spiritual murder.  i wanted to be thrown down and made aware of my body, to be rooted in Life, to feel the opposite of death; your death, mama, that was crawling all over me...

and he sat there and he listened to me say these things and with sad, down cast eyes, he nodded his head...  and i sat on the living-room floor in front of him and i waited.  i wanted so badly to feel the squeeze of his hand on my knee.  i wanted so badly for him to slide his hand across my cheek, fingers reaching into the nest of curls above my neck, pulled close and kissed hard; responded to and dealt with and loved.  i wanted so badly to be loved, in that moment more than any other moment of my life, i wanted to be loved and, in that moment, in my deep horror, love could have been anything that would have given me a reprieve, no matter how fleeting or inconsistent, from the atrocity i'd just witnessed.  the minutes passed.  and days.  and weeks.  and months.  and he never did reach out to me, not even as another human being.  he never touched me.  he left me alone in that horror, mama.  he left me sitting on the living-room floor, staring in horror, alone.

sometimes an offense against one's own humanity is so great that love simply dries up.  i don't love these men at all and i don't miss them.  not even when times are hard. not even when i need help.

my disappointment soars, mama.  i really hope you wouldn't make excuses for this shit.  i really hope you wouldn't but i think you might.

i think you might.




i'm not mad.  a bit disgusted at times but not mad.  and mostly, i'm disgusted with myself; the fact that i still crave another human being the way i do.  when the night turns cold and my bed feels so big after walking passed all these christmas lights through wet, empty streets, mama.  you planted an evil seed and you made sure to water it well.  the roots of this nauseating weakness run deep.  in fact, these traumas have perhaps exacerbated the issue.  i look at my face in the bathroom mirror and i look at the shape of my lips and eyes and i wonder, "when's someone gonna love me?"  because i know enough to know that what i've been shown thus far has not been love. i go to bed with thoughts of hands in my hair and beautiful word whispered in my ear and a strong hand sliding across my cheek, fingers reaching in to the nest of curls above my neck, pulling me forward for a hard, hungry kiss, so hard and so longed for it brings tears to my eyes.



.

tonight, the center of my heart is still

.

my bedroom window in open.  i can hear my neighbor flirting with a girl on his front porch.  and every so often, the thick click of a new can of beer being opened overlaps their giggles. 

this is the dance.

i think of my newest banner stitched to the cold pole of a stop sign in front of a wasted, graffiti covered warehouse.  the words wail out in black in white: THE WAY YOU NEED TO BE LOVED.  isn't that the only search?  isn't that what we're all up too out here?  isn't that the dance?

the voices next door lower.  they're speaking softly in spite of the beer.

the way you need to be loved...

i've been asking myself this question for a while now.  we all crave that beautiful sense of security that tends to proliferate romantic partnerships.  we all want that sense of security and belonging, of being understood.  i'm no different.  those things feel good and sometimes in the middle of the night the deepest seed hunger in me begins to ache and twist.  i think of eyes locked in to one another and hands lost in hair.  i think of eager mouths and eager hearts and sweat flying.  i think of all that gorgeous softness, all that fantastic hardness and sigh.

the way you need to be loved.

i think of the words i bang out across the keys.  i think of all my scribbles, the pages i fill, another volume of the diary nearing its end.  i think of the images i've made and the images i need to make.  i hunger after their creation.  i want them in front of me.  i want them to exist.  i want them to be seen and to be known.   my value dwindles in their absence.  a day passes and i haven't drawn and so i begin to feel the worthlessness of my life stand tall.  if i can't do this, what is my life for?

the way you need to be loved.

i remember laying awake next to the snoring body of a man who no longer touched me.  i remember waking up early to run and sweat.  i'd pretend the pounding rhythm of my feet on the pavement was the pounding of hot, delicious sex.  i was young and alive and i wanted to express those qualities, luxuriate in the beauty of them, but i was in a relationship that no longer provided for such things.  my heart broke over and over again every time he rolled on his side away from me in the bed.  i would gaze at this dark outline and try not to cry as i felt the worthlessness of my life stand tall.

the way you need to be loved.
the way you need to be loved.
the way you need to be loved.

i miss my siblings.

i miss our mother.

i thought about her a lot in Germany.  that was her fairytale land.  it's a place where anyone can fall in love.  it's a place where spectacular heartache and spectacular beauty rest side by side.  one morning as we cruised through sunrise in the most uncomfortable bus i've ever sat/slept in, i looked up right in time to see the sign for Hannover.  i thought, "that's your Germany, mama.  i'm heading back to mine; my rough and tumble Berlin"

i'm more schooled in what i do NOT want than what i do.  i look at myself in the mirror and realize that i'm simply searching.  just searching.  i've still got so many unknown corners within myself to explore.  i don't want to backtrack.  i don't envy the relationships i see around me.  all the locks.  all the ugly names.

i took this photo in a mirror inside an exhibition at the Foam Museum of Photography in Amsterdam a few weeks ago.  It's half-frame photography that ended up in an accidental double exposure.  it's actually a very accurate self-portrait.

the images collide and waver.  the outlines are indefinite.  i am searching.  must it feel like sadness?

that seed that twists itself like a knife within me is trying to tell me something but i've not yet learned its language.  i have to listen closer.  i have to get the static out of my ears and the anger out of my heart.  i have to pay attention and make room for the unexpected.  i have to pay attention and i have to be brave.  i have to use my two hands and build a life for myself that fits me.  who i truly am, not who i've been expected to be, nor the dream others have of me.

i like this moment...  laying in my bed alone listening to my neighbor flirt with a girl.  soon, another beer will crack open and i'll raise my cocktail silently toward my open window in cheers.


the way you need to be loved
the way you need to be loved
the way you need to be loved

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