Don't Give Me Choices Anymore.
A tragedy, technically.
There are parts of me that want to be used. Like a little trash can you can dump everything into. A landfill or a well. Your fears, your hopes, your dreams, your most depraved thoughts and sicknesses. If only my body was something besides a vessel, I’d be greater. A better girl, a better woman. A gooder girl. Is that a word? It should be.
Would there be a white light that drips out of my mouth every time I bare teeth? Just a little thing made for someone else, for something else other than the path I couldn’t carve. I think then I’d have purpose without the responsibility. I could wrap someone else’s desires around my body and wear it like armor. I could live my life as a ship for someone else’s journey. Getting bit by piranhas as I cut through water with a captain driving me to his final destination.
Tell me what to do. What to say. Tell me which version of me survives this. I’ve mistaken freedom for a loaded gun too many times. Don’t give me choices anymore. I can’t seem to make them without coming out the other side in ashes. I look behind me and all I see are decapitated bodies. Ghosts follow me from the other side of whatever battle I’ve endured just to haunt me when it’s over. I always seem to leave with more enemies than ones I came with. They stalk my every footprint. Waiting for me to fall. Fall to the ground. Fall asleep. Fall in love. Like they’re waiting for their chance to ruin me again.
There’s a small, beating part of me that was born to love. To embody it. Wholly. Fully. Unapologetically. And I have. I have loved everything but the very thing it occupies. The very vessel that carries it through purple violence. The other part of me was made for foresight. A magician full of calculative moves. A battle board with game pieces three times bigger than me. Plans that are six steps ahead of an invisible game that only I can see. But I am only playing defense. Like someone who’s built their whole life building exits instead of entrances.
Do you know how strong you have to be to become this tragic?
Do you know how much fucking blood is on this wall?
I don’t know if it’s all mine. Sometimes I wish someone would cut me open and tell me. Does it match? Do you think it was worth it? Do I still look pretty? I want to bleed for someone else so maybe all this blood would have somewhere to go.
I’ve been going around in circles for so long the earth has remembered my feet. Chasing my own tail with a knife in each hand, but they’re blunt and they’re used and they’re tired like me. I was made for love, stitched for endurance, but built for war. Every time I call, no one is there. But it always feels like someone is waiting to take something from me. I’ve carried my father’s vanity and my mother’s rage for so long, we’ve become friends. We’re all just a time clock away from turning into the very thing we swore we’d never become.
We all point and judge and speculate like we have the right to wear a big black robe and carry a hammer in our hands. We think we know what we’d do or how we’d react until we’re actually faced with a situation. I’ve found the same choices I’ve judged others for have been similar decisions I had to end up making for myself. I don’t want to make choices anymore. The woman in me is tired and the hands of the clock have fallen.
But no one is coming to save me. Or you. I figured if I could offer myself as a ship, I could save myself through the saving of another. I figure if I can rent my soul to someone, I can hide from a life that yearns to degrade me. Even if it means to be degraded by love. And for a masochist like me, I think that sounds like a dream I never want to wake from.