A year with myself and other things that are easy to open.

January:

Sometimes I look at you and think of the ways that you are a clever argument that I’ve been trying to win this entire time, and other days you feel like a completed week, a brown verb, something that I am trying to do again and again and again. It is hard to feel this sexual and this responsible to an online persona that I’ve constructed around repelling men like you, but it is harder to feel these things while lying on the outskirts of a dumb woman’s decisions. A dumb woman would hold you, put you between her ribs, roll over you into the night, put you in the middle of her chest and the mattress — I could go on for days about where a dumb woman would keep you — rinse your fluids around the insides of her like a mouthwash, a dumb woman would feel so much and still do it.

February:

I cannot be a dumb woman because Twitter won’t allow me to.

When I’m alone, I wonder if Twitter has ever been followed down a hollowed-out hallway with a heavy right foot and a leg that turns in at the knee. I wonder if Twitter has ever kept its mouth open, like the bird it postulates, to receive a Sunday sermon regurgitated by a man who’s Sunday felt too heavy to carry into Monday. I wonder if Twitter knows that Sundays can be subsumed into semen, and still taste like whatever God intended for hypocrisy. I wonder if it has ever seen you laugh at a joke that’s gone on for too long.

Twitter, if not, couldn’t possibly understand why I am willing to feel you on top of me again if only to remind me of the weight that a dumb woman’s pressures holds in eschewing the instruction necessary to make a smart woman out of her example.

March:

I’m trying to remember how many times we looked at each other on the night that I asked my spine for its opinion of you. I needed to know if it thought you were worth the breaking necessary to stay bent at an angle for hours, to look at my phone and will away the transmutation of my common sense into dirt, of my If he wanted to he would into He is busy we will love him again. I was the only one, out of the three of us, who tried to say something outside of your defense. I was the only one who knew better than to trust the time lapse between Delivered and Read At. I was the only one. Both you and my spine were silent.

April:

The part of September that starts to smell differently after you’ve sweat in it enough times.

It was always the second week for us. We had spent three second-weeks-of-September sweating and smelling differently before I realized that the trajectory of a life could be gauged completely two weeks into a September, three days after a Monday, and in the first hour.

Thursday, September 17th. One AM for us but not for the west coast or Illinois.

You said you had something to tell me and I asked you if it was worrisome and you smiled, you said, “No, it’s nothing bad at all. I just don’t know how to tell you,” and I said, “Okay,” and you kept driving in whirlwinds around Miami, in a waterspout below my navel, you said, “That’s it? You’re not gonna guess what it is?” and I said, — I wrote this down, I told you — “I don’t mind waiting as long as the time of my wait doesn’t correlate to any sadness I may feel.” And you smiled because I was in school so you knew I spoke like this, and I smiled because I was in school and I knew it was the only leverage I had over the dumb women you preferred to be with.

You said, “What do you mean by that?” And I said, “Will it hurt less if you tell me tonight than if you tell me in two weeks? Because if it’ll hurt more if you tell me in two weeks, then I think you have a responsibility to tell me tonight. If you care about me like you say you do.” And when your knuckles turned that steering wheel into something I could eat, when your canines smiled at me before you did, I wondered how hard either could press around my throat or if they were attached to a hand and a mouth that couldn’t do that yet: that couldn’t separate power play from something desirable and dynamic.

You said, “So you’re not gonna guess?” I said, “No, I’m not gonna guess. You’re a grown man. If you have to tell me something, you’ll use your words. I’m not gonna read your mind.”

I showed you, that night, what my body could endure for your bread. I showed you, that night, the ways that I would always make your alcohol into something that your mother would be proud of at her family suppers.

May:

In rooms, I know where you go first. You prefer corners and the sides of tables because you like to lean on both, and with your free hand, you hold a drink or a cigar or some combination of the sort if it’s a place where you know white women will be. You like to look and be looked at. You like to revel and be taken into. You like women who walk like me but laugh quietly. 

I have not seen you in six months by this time, and my body is reacting in a way that assures me of the truth in the phrase, “Put your dick on the phone; Fat Ma misses you.” It was just the backs of your hands, honestly. It was just the front of your thighs against the fabric. I did a lot of things to get your attention between the first time I saw your thighs and 10:30pm, but none more foolhardy than sitting down and standing up in the same place each time you walked towards the table with the ice sculpture on it.

By the fourth person you hugged, I noticed how kindly the drugs had taken to your face, how well they’d settled into certain sections of your skin. You hugged a lot of people but put special constrictions around the anticipations of my ego that told me This is the night you get him back. You hugged those hopes tightly, made a mockery of them against your diaphragm, let them go with the body you had briefly possessed in the embrace that was not ours.

I watched the backs of your ankles for the first time in a long time when you turned away from whatever I was in that moment, and before I left, I manipulated the names in my phone — switched my best friend’s to yours — so when she texted me I love you. I know u were disappointed with how it went tonight, but it’s for the best, it felt like your testimony instead. It worked for the drive home.

June:

S: Hi! I know we haven’t spoken in a while, but I just wanted to check in with you. This year is insane, and I’m trying to get better at the consistency (or recognizing the lack thereof) in my relationships with people, and I realized that I haven’t been consistent with you. Even with our agreement to just be friends, I feel like I could be better. I also feel really weirdly about the way we interacted with each other at the event last month, and I guess I feel weirdly because we didn’t interact with each other at all. I’m not sure if our lapse in communication / friendship continues to maintain itself because of something I did wrong, but if this is the case, I’m open to talking about it if you are. Take care of yourself and I hope to hear back from you

July:

I think, at this point, even suicide would be too dressy.

August:

Being an idiot-bitch in the summertime, I’d imagine, is much more easy than it is in the fall.

I constructed the type of tweets today that would put anyone off regarding this assumption about me: that I text and I text into a blue canyon of rectangles; that, when a man doesn’t respond with a gray one of his own, I review my life with a lack of conviction. I am rounding out the year in the skin of a woman who knows exactly what she wants from a man who doesn’t, and I am rounding out the year with the performance of a woman who doesn’t give a fuck. The heat in Miami makes me want to miss you when you don’t feel the same. The negative behind the number of my bank balance makes me want to carry your baby to term. The rumors that I hear of you dating someone else makes me want to fuck you in front of her, and the time that you did not take to respond to me in June.

The way that your body would frustrate my entire mattress if I could just get you on top of it.

The justification that I feel when I text you drunk and with a finger inside of me… 

I am talking about you looking at me in all of my mouth. 

I am talking about you hearing me all over your face. 

I am talking about fucking you with my unread texts laying face-down on your nightstand and then tweeting about respecting myself directly after.

September:

At 7:30pm, I watched you take a conversation from someone else’s body. I watched you siphon their laughter into your ribs. I saw you — with my hands — use your tongue to excuse that cigar to the left side of your mouth, place it between the mandible and maxilla of your own body, and put your eyes at the very base of whatever was required of me to stay a still version of the woman you wanted to see that night. I did all of this with the category of hope that only a dumb woman possesses. I did all of this with the grade of subjection a dumb woman would happily open her legs for.

I go home and I drink enough wine to think that I am talking to you, and I start to take your insides out with my hands. I replace them with mine and at this point, you’re almost like a puppet — you are what I get now — and you’re talking, but I get to tell you what to say this time. You are what I get now.

In my mind, I have my hand on the top of your head and you are descending into something you know you can’t breathe out of, but you are waiting anyway. You are looking anyway. You are trying anyway, and I love you for that. I tell you I love you for that with my wine spilling down the sink, with my tongue making ghosts on the mirror, and you respond through a garbled mess of what I leave on my vibrator each time I have this fantasy of you, and you are still trying anyway. I tell you again, with salt in my eye, I love you for that. I tell you again, with salt in my mouth, I love you for that.

You are what I get now. 

October:

As long as I miss your hands only in the most violent of their proclivities, I think I am doing okay.

November:

December: 

It has taken me a year to tire of thinking of you. It has taken me a year. It has taken me a new job and a new workout partner and no more dairy and a rejection of organized religion to not want to be acknowledged by you on the outskirts of a field in the beginning of May. Last May, I saw you in the field while you threw a football with children, and you saw me walk across the field with my friend, and when I got home — when you could no longer see me — you texted me and said, “Kept seeing you from afar. Did you enjoy yourself today?”

It was last May. It is now December.

I stand in my mirror every night and try to see what you couldn’t and there is a lot there. There is a softness that comes when it is coaxed out of me. There is an armor that mollifies like that ice sculpture. There is an intersect where God dipped my leg in Georgia before attaching it to a hip he’d let soak in North Carolina for far too long, and while he was soaking, tending to more potent crises, both had expanded in just the right areas to make you understand and to make your girlfriend vote for more restrictive reproductive processes. It is an intersect.

I tell myself nightly that you are just an argument, that I can put you away anytime, that I can resurrect you when I want to. I tell myself nightly that I am the section of discourse that makes sense. That I am diluting everything that makes it easy for others to trust me every time I try to present a new reason for why you weren’t ready to. It’s a silly game that I play but so were you, so when I weigh these choices comparatively, I don’t do so with a heavy hand: I just keep reminding myself that I can resurrect you if I want to.

There is a theology in me now, and it reminds me that the wife you wanted is still out there somewhere. It reminds me that what I am instead of her is embarrassingly alive and impressive — I pull wild Grecian weather out of me every night — and I am tired of thinking of you. It reminds me that you are not worth the sectional violence that wonders who you are as I stare at you two weeks into our third September together, and it reminds me that while this is not the December that I prayed for, I can still take care of it anyway.

I will always be a dumb woman, I think, because a dumb woman requires things that a smart woman, in good conscious, cannot: exclamation points after her name, an amphora of jasmine oil for the second date, the kind of romance that does not fall through the mind easily — it does not make sense — a thumb across her brow when no other method seems to soothe her. I call it a December kind of dumb: it gets dark early, it’s cold but familiar, it’s a reason to come home — but it is nourishing, it is hopeful, it is alimentary. You could get lost in this type of uselessness, but you could find yourself there, too. An adventure is what my inadequacy is. A carnival for my patheticism. A year with myself and other things that are easy to open, and the water for my flowers.

The oil for my graze.

The salt for my correction of you.