Unattached narratives

Charlie makes the same face every time they tell a joke they know they probably shouldn’t. They shift their jaw a tiny bit to the left, their eyes to the right. They start to crack a smile, intermittently, but it doesn’t poke through easily. They don’t let anyone know they think they’re funny. But they know. They’ve made this face a lot lately, they seem lighter; they seem fuller. I could watch the same face and hear the same corny joke every day for the rest of my life, and laugh like it was new. I could watch them smile until my eyes burned out. I wanted this to be unattached but I feel their joy in my chest, and I’m so thankful for that. I’m so thankful for this.

There is a pink haze over the city tonight
I’m sitting in a parking lot, texting you in a panic again
I’m sorry I haven’t gotten it together yet
At least we caught the end of the sunset
I love the way the full moon hits your cheek
Please don’t get tired of me
I took a picture of the orange,
I spent all day in bed
I don’t want to waste my life away
I don’t want you to grow sick of me

I hope you forget about me when you move away and start over.

I hope you don’t bring me up anymore, and that bottling it all inside eats you alive.

I hope you never tell your new friends about me, I hope you think of me every night.

I want you to hurt like I did. I healed, thank god. And I moved on. But I live every day with the guilt you gave me.

I have a picture of you,
23, surfing under our sheets to
Climb your way up my chest
Into the cavities that lay beneath,
Your teeth against my neck and your hands holding me,
I have a picture of you in my head
That plays across my brain every
Night and I am reminded again, and again
How good it is to love you the way I do
Raw and unusual and passionate and true

This is my body
Size 12, wiggle room
Jiggly thighs, 5’2
(And a quarter. It matters)
Overgrown roots blend
Into DIY blonde,
Somewhere in between
“Well kept” and “definitely depressed”
Acne scars, decently white teeth
Scar on my brow from that time I tried
Rollerblading into the sun, I swallowed the pavement on the way down. You can still see the cracks in my teeth, just underneath my laugh lines. I always tried to stay as positive as possible. No matter what.

This is my body, it holds memories like water weight.
Destined to burst, void of drains,
Man Made pores- formed from the inside out by cries for help that never surfaced.
Porous and calloused, found out that its purpose for a year straight was simply surviving.

This is my body. Flashbacks on a marquee, survivor’s hands painted nicely, so no one ever asked me why they were so *****, and broken, and ******.

This is my body
His dead skin under my nails,
Petrified.
Proof of a fight. scars on my arms
North of my elbow: survivor’s guilt in the shape of a Star, I spent last summer wishing night after night I wasn’t alive- I was so tired from pretending.

This is my body.
Latches like a leech to anything warm.
****** dry all of my loved ones in the year I spent spiraling,
searching for solace or sanity-
even safety. Found nothing but panic.
Nervous bird in a cage.
Narrow shoulders.
Boxer’s stance.
Dancing on the front line where I should have been to fight
Using my fists never worked.  
Neither did screaming “no, no, no”
Present until that very day. And now I lay silent.
Absent like a soldier, staring into space.
Trying to make sense of the shaking.


This is my body.
I have my mother’s eyes, her mother’s brain.
Black and white, strict like law,
Cemented in place for weeks at a time,
Then Moving at the speed of light, I cannot stop or I will die.
Creaky chest upside down, my stomach clings to my ribs.
Stand still until the room stops spinning
Or until my head stops hurting
And my legs stop shaking
And you stop when I ask you to stop
“This is my body” I whisper behind your hands as you steal all autonomy
I am left with nothing


This is my body.
He took it from me,
Did not even have to try to ruin my insides,
Did not blink an eye in the year I spent unraveling in front of everyone I loved,
Pulled out every lash I had, lost my job because of panic attacks,
But I am commanding it back.
I spent the last 6 months building from the ground up.
Spent the last 12 taking up the space I did not before.
The last 3 learning that it’s okay to.
I stopped apologizing in January.
I started yelling again in February.
It took that long to think anyone would ever hear me,
No one ever had.
This year I took my body back.
This is my body. Size 12, 5’2. Wiggle room.
Sometimes it can’t breathe right and shuts down in big crowds.
But this is my body and it is big and it is loud.
It takes up space, it is strong, it is pretty.
This is my body and for absolutely none if it, am I sorry.
Not a single part.

And I will romanticize the way we fell out of love until the day I die so that I may mourn in peace. I don’t want to know you as someone who violated my boundaries and called it care. I don’t want to know you as someone who stepped into my chest and destroyed everything in sight in the blink of an eye. Without even trying, really. I don’t want to know you as someone who robbed me of a year of life and gave me two years of flashbacks and rose memories and harrowing remembrance of what was- what was so powerful and encompassing and beautiful that when we split I knew nothing but emptiness. I don’t want to admit or accept that I allowed myself to be treated like that. So I will remember the way you hurt me but leave that part out when I talk about you. I will write about you in gold to give myself more time to forget what was underneath.