My life has had three loves
Three men who have changed my lines
into the edges that they are now
Parts of me that were sketched in with pencil
are now lined in permanent ink
Sharpie graffiti on a bathroom stall
-the only way to erase it is to paint it all away
Removing what was there before and after.
One:
Was false.
His love was all flowery language and hyperbole
But there was no nourishment behind what he fed me
He was prince charming to my untouched innocence
But he carried the poisoned apple
Not all villains look like villains.
He
was everything I wanted because he made himself look that way
Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing,
my grandmother used to say
But I did not see him for the predator that he was
until it was too late
He had already bitten into me
My blood was spilt
My heart lay on the hard bedroom floor
Beside my fallen glasses
and jeans that I would never wear again
and I wanted to run
but you can’t outrun a beast
and you’re not supposed to let an animal chase you
and all my broken self could do
was hobble
So I left
in pieces
bit by bit
until I said “good bye” to him and the girl
I had once been
Two:
Was like a deep breath after being submerged
Lungs flooded with apathy and desperation
Desperate to feel like myself again
It had been so long since my body
felt like my body
But he made it talk, he made it sing
And he loved the song we made together
Though not as much as I did
I knew all along
I was more invested
And in tune with the “us”
But that was okay
Because he had me feeling again
Shadows of love and lust and yearning
and, as cheesy as it is, happiness
But some days
the talking stopped
The radio silence could go on for days
and it felt as though he was leading a second life
He was a stranger
even though
I could tell you what his father gave him on his 4th birthday
and that he thought he was a disappointment to his mother
Secrets were the blankets we used to cover up with at night
It wasn’t until after he had left and our relationship
was a crumpled liner note in the recycling bin
that I realized how much of myself I had hidden
in order to stay that quiet, meek, pixie-emotional-basketcase of a girl
he had met
I was a shrunken version of myself
Laugh not so loud
Voice at half-mast
I stopped asking questions for the times he made me feel stupid for not knowing the answers
But I felt like he had brought so much of me back
And there were nights we’d lie awake, talking about the apocalypse and science fiction
And he’d read to me from The Prince and Hitchhiker’s Guide
And he’d force me to read my poetry
And we’d fight about how he considered the genre of minority literature to be racist
And everything was perfect
with our political conversations and
negotiations in the bedroom
When we met for coffee one afternoon
after everything was over
after he had made the last decision for me
He was curious when I bit back
Sarcasm and cynic dripping
A smirk on my face
Pretending that seeing his angled face didn’t give me
heart palpitations
Didn’t make me feel like
throwing up my iced coffee
Didn’t make me feel like
drowning in his eyes
But, this time,
I saved myself
I threw myself a boughie and left
Without being submerged.
Three:
I wasn’t looking for him.
I found out later that he had given up looking for me
I had given up too.
but something in his hazy blue eyes on the afternoon we met
after casting our ballots for a new order
made me realize
This was different
Though I didn’t want to believe
of all the lips that have touched my skin
his created the most heat
The blush that he evoked from my cheeks
when his cloudy sky eyes pondered me
could stop the harshest frost bite
His caress, his caress could both soothe aching muscles
and thoughts and
Start a storm inside my belly
My hot and his cold fronts collided into a beautiful mess
This is the man who pledges his love every night,
countless times
who sings me a lullaby of “you are beautiful”s
to lull me into pleasant dreams
and his heart beat in my ear works better at keeping the
nightmares away than the leather dreamcatcher above my bed
His voice makes my heart speed up and slow down
And when the void comes too close to where I stand
He is there to cover me
Protecting myself from myself
He is the man to write home about
The one I find myself daydreaming into the future with
And if One made me figure out how to fight
And if Two made me figure out how to speak
Then Three makes me figure out how to accept
Accept myself, my past, my future.
