Keep The Change

All the reasons he thought I was crazy—and all the reasons he couldn’t find enough of them to leave.

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God forbid I ever paint our conversations in the same color he did. I’ve counted our fights like I’ve traced the lines in my hands—roads to nowhere, tunnels to oblivion. Not enough letters for all the things I wanted to say, sometimes too many for the things I didn’t. My thoughts became a tangled wave of poetry, assaulting the neurons in my brain. In pieces, in puzzles. In all the ways I couldn’t solve them. But I could feel. The blessing. The curse. The best. The worst. All the reasons he thought I was crazy—and all the reasons he couldn’t find enough of them to leave. Because where does one go after me, but into a lukewarm bath of boredom, drowning in a porcelain rectangle of shit?

I was jealous of him—not like girls are jealous of their friends, but in the way he got to experience me in ways I couldn’t. I wanted to live inside his eyes, with my mind backing the perception. I wanted to show him what vision was. Where a mind goes when it stops wandering. How the girl in front of him was born with a world inside her.

I wanted to touch myself through his hands. I wanted to squeeze my breasts with his hands, pinch my nipples between his fingertips. The freckle in his palm pressed against the soft skin of my inner thighs, leading to the ripe fruit of desire. I’m no better than a man. Except through his eyes, I saw the things he didn’t have the courage to see. The things he was too afraid to touch. You can’t make a woman come until you’ve learned to be her hero through the art of villainy. The perfect twist of words to make her brain spill inside itself, filling her skull with pink liquid, like tomato soup in a bowl.

And when you can’t do these things, when you bring no peace to a girl’s imaginings, this is what we do. We fill the empty spaces, impregnating the void with worst-case scenarios, “what-ifs,” and “who-done-its.” Because that’s all it ever was, wasn’t it? Many “I love you’s” roll off a man’s tongue if there’s somewhere else he can put it. But it takes from you, like a withdrawal, a purchase at the checkout line. And you never keep the change.

I see them in my face. The ones that took me backpacking through Hell. The fire has warped the details of my features into the likeness of them. They’ve burrowed into my skin like fleas, skipping and bouncing beneath my pores, contorting my face into the shape of their souls. I could claw my eyes out for how long I’ve stared in the mirror, trying to pick them from my reflection. Digging up their graves only to discover they’re still alive somewhere, knowing a part of them died inside of me.

Can anyone else see them?