I can't go back to these places now.
Sometimes I sit so still, spiders aim to make a home of me, spooling strings between my arm and the wall. Please, make a city of silk akin to New York, Seattle, around my corpse. Make my legs trains, my arms skyscrapers, my throat a park, my skull a museum.
Please.
Oh, please. Oh, stop. Oh, horsefeathers.
The stream with minnows and birds no longer serves as a sanctuary but a place to be minced by the dead - that conversation (do you have a place? I am now my own place), beat for beat (god damn those long pauses), the stage directions (Kyle does not know how to sit. Kyle does not know where to put his hands. Kyle now wishes his body would settle into stone, like Stonehenge, or a marble statue so birds can shit on him, he deserves it). The last time I went, maybe a week after he walked away from me permanently, I watched a dead fish, caught up against a rock, unable to float with the rest of the current. It was eviscerated, its guts pulled out like strings of cotton candy. I turned it out with a stick, watched it bumble down and away into the stream.
I think of our time in the backseat, the windows cracked, the boiling summer air, passerby cigarette smoke, and charcoal fumes, owls cooing, how he pulled my guts out, and it was sweet, I could taste how sweet he was.
I avoid the theater, and Tony's. In autumn, I turned on the lights of South Perk at six am and sighed. Did any of that really happen? Is this reality anymore? I looked out to the patio, wiping away the frost, see my flowers decaying at the edges of their petals, and think yes. Yes, it happened. Do better next time, will you?
I ask the dead animals at home: "You saw everything. Why didn't you warn me?"
"Why would we warn you?" they bellow in unison, "No one warned us."
…
Ike didn't quite understand our grandmother's death. He was too young, barely a toddler. My mother told him that he would see her again someday, but it would be a very long time. I was eight, but I understood that death was death, there's no afterlife, ghosts aren't real, there's a logical explanation for everything. But now I see the dead all the time.
A few months after we buried grandma, I was walking with Ike after school. We passed by a lot of restored buildings (the SoDoSoPa), and this older woman - silver bob, gold-rimmed glasses beige tunic and slacks, much like how our savta dressed - was sitting on a bench reading. When Ike saw her, he broke off my grip on his hand, galloped to her, face pink with joy, and exclaimed, "Grandma! You're alive!"
That poor woman was so stunned, staring at him with her mouth open.
"Sorry, sorry," I said pulling him away, trying not to laugh. "Ike, that's not grandma. That lady just looks like her."
"But…"
He cried the whole time I dragged him home.
My father, upon hearing the story, also laughed. I guess we do share a fucked-up sense of humor.
Of course, my mother didn't find it funny at all. She cradled Ike in her lap and scolded us, "She was my mother, how dare you?"
Many times I'll see a boy. His hair will be chestnut brown and his eyes are, too. He will have a peppy gait, buzzing charisma, surrounded by friends. Many times I'll double-take, thinking Clyde! You're alive!
…
"Did a snake get into your garden or something?" Wendy asked, a glass of lemonade on her knee, ankles crossed over a wicker chair. Chinese lettering was inked into the arch of her foot. She, Kenny, and I were sitting around on the screened-in porch of her house. Kelso and Jackie purred, curled around each other in my lap. I had just finished telling them about the date, and the dream I had while passed out.
"No, I haven't come face to face with a snake in years."
"Cartman doesn't count?" Kenny joked.
"Maybe you saw one in a movie," Wendy suggested. "What was the last movie you watched? Before your date yesterday, I mean."
"Some TV movie about a personal trainer who kills their clients. No snakes."
Kenny drew his knees up to his chest. He watched the silver windchime clattering in the tree above us.
"Snakes get a bad rap," he said. "I blame Adam and Eve."
"This snake was trying to swallow me, I think."
"How do you know it wasn't about to talk to you?"
"Didn't seem like the talking type, Ken."
We went back and forth like this, turning over every detail of this vision like we were studying leaves. Wendy tilted her head back and closed her eyes. Kenny made a point (which I hadn't ever considered), that snakes represent change. Snakes leave their skin when it no longer suits them.
I feel uncomfortable in my skin. Can I leave it behind?
He added to this point that I was on a river, two signs of change, narrative pushing. I've got a temporary, but new job, new relationship.
Wendy asked me if I told Craig about what happened to me yet. I said no. I was scared.
"You need to tell him soon. That's a deal-breaker for some people."
…
"I'm not used to dating someone who isn't…"
Craig stared across the table to me. We were eating lunch by the greenhouse - him with some leftover mac and cheese and me with a tomato sandwich I wasn't enjoying at all. He was patient, never chastising me for my freakout the other Saturday. I was still embarrassed.
It was June now, and the heat layered over us with dull dryness. After that day, we are lunch in his office.
"Who isn't what?"
He wrung his hands. "I was going to say 'normal,' but I know that's not the right word."
"Neurotypical."
"Yeah. That's what I meant. Sorry."
"It's fine."
"I've never dated anymore for more than a few months in general, actually."
I've never been one to ask about people's romantic past. I never even asked Bebe about past boyfriends. But this piqued my interest.
"Why not?"
"I've just never been able to stick it out long term, I guess."
Red.
Flag.
He must have clocked how large my eyes became.
He said, "it's different with you, though."
"How?"
"I just have a really good feeling about us. I feel connected to you. I know that you have…"
"Issues?"
"...troubles. I know you have troubles sometimes, but I'm really happy when I'm with you. I can, you know… I can picture us for the long haul."
Do you see why I fell for the guy? It was too soon to say I loved him, but I did. I realized it just as he said that.
"I can picture it, too," I said. "You make me want to be a better person."
"Oh, stop. You're already a good person."
You know by now (you as in whoever else ends up reading this besides Dr. T'Soni) (if the burning thing doesn't happen) that I don't consider myself to be a good person. I never will be. So, I didn't believe him when he said I'm a good person, but I believed that he believed (my god, you don't actually know me at all, I've been wearing a mask this whole time), and Wendy's words whipped back to me, hard.
I had to tell him the truth.
