Sending You My Lovely Regards
*This was written as a collage piece in an experimental writing class I took at Cal Arts in 2004. I rearranged various sections from my diary into a “cohesive” tale.
Sending You My Lovely Regards
It wasn’t until later you began to prune my heart, snipping here and there until I realized the sound of water dripping from the faucet was really my heart leaking out all over the place. You told me something a year ago at church when we were filling up the decanters, “It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s circling.” In my chest I’d wanted to draw a heart that had been flattened into paper and used as a firing target. How do you end it, the imprint of our disappearance?
I asked Lauren, “What am I supposed to do?” She told me, “Go out! Wear lots of sexy lipgloss…apply it a lot.”
I hit a T stop, make a right onto Malibu Road; Darren’s supposed to be in a red Beamer on the left after the empty lot. Every space has a personality, but this coffee and bagel place is just shit. I don’t even know why people are here. I’m here, I guess, because of you. When Darren arrives I know because before the door opens he is speaking–talking talking even when there’s nobody to answer. I have moments of such devout hate for this man that you’d think I was in love with him except I feel like he’s my unruly, unreachable, uncommunicative teenage son.
When my heart was young, my first love licked it, said it tasted like Breyers Vanilla. It’s something you can feel on the outside of your skin—if you have been entered into. It’s almost like the feeling doesn’t belong to you, or to your body. It’s like it belongs to the room itself, to the shadows moving across the walls.
Your body was ill, it had a crack in it when I brought it to LA (just beneath the price tag) and I think it was always wanting to break. We have to break things down to understand them and then we can piece them back together but we’ll never see the whole again. We’ll still see the cracks where things break into parts.
I go home and strangers are walking through our house, looking through my clothes. Am I just supposed to think of them as ghosts? I’ve had years of experience with that; I live in a state of terror, as usual. And I’m sure I have the off-switch I’m sure I’ve swallowed that somehow but there’s so much inside me. I need to clean out my innards because I don’t think my organs are put together right.
There have been so many with their half selves, like doppelgangers. Scattered bits of soul mate. I’m tired of men like little girls who want Teddy Bears tucked in their elbows that they can carry around and fuck and leave on top of their sheets between the bedroom pillows. I need someone I can take home to my sisters who will still think I am the prettiest girl in the room. Am I just greedy? Greed has done strange things to my body.
I saw a homeless man yesterday with dirty nails and hair that stuck to the back of his neck and I wondered what he would feel like on top of me because he was young and his eyes were blue like yours. I am sick of wasting time with warm bodies dreaming of the you I could cut out of them at night.
But is it you? It’s not you. Is it?
A boy asked his father for his breath and then capped it in a pudding jar. I should have done that. So I could breathe you in, still have you inside me.
I met someone today. He looked like a sturdy tent I could crawl inside and zip myself into. He’d probably keep out the wind and the rain. I picked him out like a new shirt at a secondhand shop, not exactly my size, but close enough to settle. He says I am a statue. Statues can feel; they like to be touched.
If you could scream something, one thing, on a boat, on a Sunday, on a morning far out at sea, what would you scream? Would you burn the insides out of someone? Would you leave them empty for most days of the week, like a church?
I am sitting here, thinking of you, weighed down with rocks, laughing at the way the steeple reaches toward the sky.
© 2005 Milly Sanders All Rights