siren calling

my best friend, my constant companion:


you're the ache in my bones, the spasm in my neck, the piercing hot poker in my back. your scissorhand punctures my atlas, eases up the base of my skull and bullies into my soft grey brainstem. you're the tender bruised rotting on my heart.

you ride in on rain, blood, and tears, siren calling, my familiar. i've missed you; we run away, hide, curl up fetally. when you leave, i count the days and am amazed, growing old in a prison of my own destruction.

and you
and you
and you

you make me medicate, escape: i could list the drugs, but i won't. i rifle through my bag for the pill bottle and shake it around in the light, searching for the oddly shaped tablet bitten in half. i close my office door, sit down, chase it with icy water and wait for sharp edges to blur in a warm rush. half is perfect; a full portion results in belly itch and balloon face.

you're gonna love me

a masseuse helps me forget. i am vulnerable, topless and face down, ignoring new age melodies. she could easily hurt me, and does, a little, spreading warm lubricant all over my back. she lightly rubs small circles around the ligaments strained from jaw clenching tension, and on one side of my neck it grates but on the other, it is sensitive and weirdly stimulating, so good to the point it almost isn't and i want her to stop-stop-stop but not. she plants her elbow in the middle of my back and glides along trigger points in the muscles that run up into my shoulder, and again, dancing our customized ballet in intimate space. my face is pressed down harder into the donut hole on the end of the table as i exhale with the motion. there is no talking, only breathing, tactile feeling, only now. in the age of internet and technology, this is primal communication, touch. it is best in the moment.

take
it
from
me
some
day
we'll all be free

i am drawn to troubled souls and desperately rebuke / revel in our weakness.

the effects of his melancholia

he jumped out a window, cleanly and methodically, crushed and bloody, the strongest thing he'd ever done.

the glass had been neatly removed from the window and there were no signs of struggle

you sent me to the emergency room on christmas day; i had to justify you. the resulting therapy keeps you from my thoughts and body for one hour a week. beginning my session, she straps me in and while leaning down into my face says, "you have a lot of hair. i'm secretly jealous." she is athletic charisma, unaffected. i notice a charming, tiny hole in the armpit of her shirt.

i died a hundred times
you go back to her
and I go back to black

101: death by misadventure, her best friend, the bottle. i miss her and the way she sang my blues with intimate detail.

my therapist inspects the tiny vertebrae of my neck with his fingers, seeing by feeling. he presses a spot that shoots straight up into my skull and i am nearly blinded by a familiar feeling in a lethal dose. i found it, he declares. it feels leathery, and it will hurt a bit, but i'm going to try to clear this out for you

clear
this
out

he's tender this time, calibrated by my wince and it's... leathery, he repeats, a tiny spasm he coaxes. i trust him, completely, my head in his hands. he gives me a plastic bag of ice for the ride home and i thank him.

you're beat up and broken down, but you'll be back. you were there after surgery when the anesthesia wore off, and the doctor pressed down on the sutures to expel whatever was left in me. the burning, the pressure, the searing, the dry heaving that seized me with every retch. the 10 of my scale, and nothing compares to you.

i want to keep walking into the ocean

i sat on the shore at twilight, small and scared, watching the real life scene from a movie, wondering if she would turn around and walk back out or if she'd succumb to the lunar pull like the waves; some things are irresistible.

i am getting rid of you piecemeal, and my headache is gone. i am lost without the comfort of distraction that became my sole focus. my thoughts are clearer.

i see another therapist who says one true thing: life is hard.

i miss you.