sometimes i get an idea in my head, and i gotta write it down real fast before it goes away forever so
I’m sorry i snuck away from dinner and plodded up the stairs but my
head was drumming too fast heart pounding too fast and
here it is, unpolished, but existent, somehow and that’s a miracle in and of itself  

I  am eating dinner with my family, minus my sister plus five guests, all with different backstories (but they’re not important now). I am eating dinner with ten strangers who I ought to know better. The first woman talks, the one in the sundress, with tanned shoulders.

and i’m mad at her for being in a bad marriage where she is hurt time and time again, and won’t realize, for being intolerable and intolerant (she doesn’t like people like me), and for her black curls which are beginning to gray because
I look to her daughter, who shares her eyes and silently wonder what her fate will become.

Later, later, they talk of politics, of my father’s late mother, of Christian truck drivers, of moments I wasn’t present for, and I sit, and swallow my hamburger meat and barbecue sauce and giggle every once in awhile so they know I’m still alive. Somebody starts talking about alternative education, and my grandfather listens attentively while sipping Blue Moon out of a can and the woman with gray fluffy hair whom I love so and for whom I’m named joins the conversation. I don’t remember what she says. I do know

in another life, she was trapped in a marriage with a loveless *******. She escaped and left him; he dated his therapist after and they might’ve gotten married; I’m not sure since we stopped getting updates on him awhile ago). I never loved him, and neither did my sisters so it didn’t matter.

What mattered though, and what still does matter is that she was so observant. I think that’s how she tells people she loves them; she whispers little details she sees to them, and is so genuine about it.

Once, a woman said that truck drivers thing told me I only acted nice when I wanted things, and since then we’ve been drifting apart, and it’s like there’s been blue clouds of ice forming between us, the kind you see in Finland in the winter. She was warm to me today, in a plasticy way, and I tried to be pleasant. I think I was too blunt, though. I wish I could mean it, when I was sociable and lovely, but it’s all an act.

I scrape my fork against my porcelain plate, and swallow once again. The tomatoes sting on my lips; they are too acidic, and the mozarella has been stained by the red, shriveled because it absorbed the juice and
suddenly this is the most terrible salad, and the most terrible night and I suddenly feel so green with rage that I run to my room.

And I inevitably return to the table, and the people, and the lights, and I avoid their eyes, but by now the children have wandered and one is arranging lemon squares on a platter in the kitchen for dessert. Thank god.

I start talking in the bright kitchen, much too fast, and then I chide myself and try to look at everyone else. A child sits, perched on the counter. “Can you do this?,”  she inquires, and clucks her tongue and smiles, her sunburned nose ever visible in the light. Her eyes are green and too big for her face and my heart hurts because she is truly lovely, and she means it.