The cruelty of the summer exists between the heatwave sleepless nights & the ominous treachery of everything opening up. On the summer solstice, I pull The Fool & I’m supposed to believe this is a kind of emerging. I’m able to take care of some needs but my currents are waterlogged. My goddess of war is the wettest two-piece fish fry & the bottom of a man-made river. Most days feel like a parade of salt in a slug city. How can so many people cut my sweet at the root yet complain when my petals drop.
Nothing is precious because believing such sets me up for grief. Bighead calls this an efficiency. Babymama notices my eyebrows. They’re not wrong. But who can understand why I never believe things will be ok. That’s not a useful metric. I am okay to dissect, disappear, forget, go forth, cease & so on. But these options worry others most & I keep tricking myself into utility.
I wish I believed anyone when they said I was worth it. How many (men) have spat what I deserved in their hand to give me nothing raw? The only value I place on myself is in relation to what I hate. Nothing I love knows I exist. No one who loves me believes I’m as fragile as I say. I am a collection of shattered glass under a borrowed spotlight as reflective as jewels but futility to place.
Even before I began as a woman, my father held me. I slept in his arms more than my mother after a certain age. I never understood a man’s fear of my body. I lay her out in a gorgeous display. She’s my trophy & I want to be someones. All my accomplishments (esp the immaterial) are other people’s projections. I’m a hot prop with a bad attitude & y’all want my name, not my sound.
I want to dream again. I feel like I tethered myself to the worst possible present tense. Nothing I fought for survived the winter, except my kids. Their father didn’t. My throuple didn’t. My pup ran away. Nemesis has its own myths elsewhere indefinite. I thought I was grieving people but I’m grieving purpose.
“I knew the word divorce before marriage. That my conception was a plot, not a pleasure. / My father was first introduced to me as a man who owes women everything.”
-- Lottery (via Patreon)
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