For Amari, A Love Letter

It is only because I love you this much that I promise that I will never stop being your villain.

I will stand next to her in your mind so that all my dark eats up her light, and you can’t make out a single one of her flaws next to my black mass of wrong.

When she makes you cry, I’ll slither out of that lonely place in your skull and ask you to remember all those time that, though you begged for me to stop, I murdered all the parts of you that loved me right before your eyes. I will curl up in your ear and whisper true stories of my own selfishness and self-inflicted suffering.

That night that you showed up when I was on stage and said that all you wanted was to dance beside me, all you wanted was to feel the heat of my body, and I let you stay but would not allow you to touch me, not really touch me.

That night that you showed up on my doorstep scared and said all you wanted was to lie down next to me, all you wanted was for me to hold you through the night, and I let you into my bed but would not allow you my arms to wrap yourself in.

That night you showed me your scars and said that all you wanted was to feel wanted, all you wanted was for my love to stop the bleeding, and I let you myself kiss you but would not allow our lips to touch.

That night you showed me I hadn’t lost you and said that all you wanted was a smart girl like me, all you wanted was someone to care for, and I let you stay but would not allow you to call yourself my girlfriend.

That night you showed me you’d die without me and said that all you’d wanted was to see your ring on my finger, and all you wanted was for me to care that you’d thrown that ring in the river, and I let you cry and would not allow myself to begin to fix it.

That night you showed me the dress you’d picked out for your date with her and said that all she  wanted was to see your hair in braids, and all you wanted was for her to like you, and I let you go and would not allow myself to chase her car down the street when she picked you up from my apartment.

It took more than three years for me to fully dismember your love for me, for me to gut your heart and stitch it up hollow, so that you could fill it with feelings for someone better, someone who could love you the way that you deserve to be loved. And I hope you never know how happy I am that you’ve found her or how it hurts a little more each day that you still hate me. I hope you never find out about the mornings that I can’t get out of bed because I know you’ll never lie next to me again. I hope you never think that maybe I've changed, that maybe it could work now, because I know that thinking like that only holds me back.

Which is why, all I want is to be your villain. My place is that shadowy space in your memory, from which I appear only to reassure you that you’ve made the right decision marrying her and promising to love her happily ever after. I want to be your villain as long as it keeps you safe, as long as it keeps you from hurting, as long as it keeps you from regretting, as long as it keeps you from missing me, as long as you need me to be.

"In Vise" and other works I could not translate

The past three nights

I dreamed you were crying.

You stained my doorstep with your tears on the first,

you lamented our fate by my hospital bed on the second,

and I led you and your lover to safety

from the storm of the century on the third

after assuring you that she would warm up

your cold feet, if only you'd ask her.

Still, I was not allowed to touch,

just like now.

I offer you my arms,

and when I think you'll accept them

I wake up wrapped around nothing,

longing to fall back asleep.

I have yet to determine whether these dreams mean

that you are in trouble

or that I am.

Ma Poisse,

I’m trying hard to remember what it is about you in particular that makes my heart sink when you come to mind now, years later.

All I know is that when I add it all up—your incessant lying, your emotional manipulation, the fact that you weren’t even two-faced but at least three- or four-faced—I don’t like you at all.

This leads me to believe that whatever it is that exists in me that still feels anything for any part of you has much more to do with me than it does with you.

Why is there still a part of me that wants to love someone as hollow-hearted as you? Why is there a part of me that wants someone who doesn’t treat me like I’m human? How can I find this part of me and smother her?

I haven’t found the answer, but I’m searching, ready with weapons at hand, just in case I find her, my sadistic side, so that I can relish in murdering her and breaking the curse that binds me to you. 

Hope you're well.

—J

Dear Peach,

When I first met you, you were wearing sweatpants, and I was probably not wearing much of anything. I know that I was with three or four people, and we were probably doing something weird, though I cannot remember what. You were visiting your friend, who later became your roommate. Whatever we were doing, you seemed not to approve of it and made a comment and gave a look to indicate as much. Maybe you were put off by encountering a group of people as strange as yourself. Sweet southern belle that she is, I think that you are the only person in the world that my roommate ever called a “cunt.” And I know that it probably wasn’t her first word of choice. She probably just agreed once I said it. (I, however, have always appreciated the word cunt and used it freely. Cunt. I think of canned peaches when I think of cunt. I can’t explain why.)

I miss our freshman year insomnia. I don’t miss staying up so many nights in a row that I felt like the floor was moving or waking up confused on benches in the mid-afternoon, but I do miss you.

After I got past calling you a cunt, our relationship entered into a new territory where I was vaguely afraid of you. Not because of anything you did or said but because J-Fro tried to convince me that you were in lesbians with me, and I was freaked out by the possibility of an attractive not strictly hetero girl having any kind of anything for me, though I was (and still am) pretty sure that J-Fro was just a sociopath who was trying to get me to think that you were a weirdo so that I wouldn’t befriend you. He would always tell me that you’d been asking where I was or that you talked about me a lot when I wasn’t around. And then there was the time that you were really excited because you’d just gotten your hamster, and you burst in and exclaimed, “Want to see my hamster?!?” Of course immediately after you left, J-Fro quipped, “She wants to show you her hamster. You know what that means!” I did not know for certain, but I was pretty sure that it meant that you wanted to show off the rodent you’d just purchased from the pet store.

I eventually wrote J-Fro off, deciding that you were not in lesbians me or with anyone, except maybe the silent boy who lived across the hall. You and I had become friends, bonding over sleeplessness and Tennessee Williams plays.

You did kiss me on Mardi Gras, and your lips and tongue were stained red from whatever you’d been drinking. Your mouth tasted sort of fruity. I didn’t know how to react to the entire situation because you were drunk and a pretty girl and my friend and kissing me in public and Richard was there and Richard’s mom was also there. Did Richard’s mom think that all fags were going to hell? She seemed good-natured and fun-loving but hailed from Alabama; I couldn’t be sure. I had this part-embarrassed, part-confused, part-ecstatic buzz for the next few hours. I was like, “Oh fuck, Katy Perry, I kissed a girl and I did like it, and sexuality is much less straightforward than your pop song makes it sound.” Growing up, I’d clung to very close friendships with other girls, very, very close friendships. I’d been naked with plenty of these friends. I’d slept next to them, showered with them, cuddled them, held their hands, massaged their backs and necks, watched porn with them, and exchanged notes with them that (taken out of the context of our fairly tame relationships) could be construed as passionate love letters. Sometimes we would kiss each other affectionately on the cheek or forehead, every once in awhile, we’d peck on the lips. I’d shotgunned smoke out of one these friend’s mouths, but all of the things I’ve just mentioned were not quite the same as the Mardi Gras kiss from you because all of these things had been the result of gradual boundary-pushing caused by intense, codependent friendships. Most of these things were easily explained away (showering together to save time because we were in a hurry, hanging out naked together because it was too hot) or top secret. I’d been accused of lesbianism before by concerned mothers, but their daughters were always quick to come to my defense, “Mom, she is not gay!” Even though in the back of my mind I would occasionally pick up on a barely audible whisper that taunted, Or am I? Your kiss had come out of left field, and there wasn’t even a whisper, it was just a loud and clear YOU ARE AT LEAST SOMEWHAT GAY.

All of that being said, I think it was even more what happened a few hours later that confirmed my interest in women. J-Fro texted me and asked if I’d seen you. He said that you’d gotten lost and needed someone to make sure you got home safely. You called me sobbing saying you’d been separated from your friends and were having an anxiety attack. Your phone was dying, it was raining, the streets were impossibly crowded. You needed me to come find you.

“Where are you?”

“McDonald’s.”

“Which McDonald’s?”

It was too loud, you were too drunk, my phone signal was awful.

We checked the McDonalds near Canal and University and didn’t see you. Fighting our way through the crowd just to get there probably took an hour. We realized we’d have to elbow our way through the masses on Canal to check the next McDonalds, blocks away. We found you there, and you were standing near the doorway, holding your phone, trying to call or text, though I’m pretty sure it was useless at that time. You were wearing a purple dress that I’d given you. I think you’d gotten ready in my room before you went out. You were so happy to see me and I was so happy that you were okay, and it took forever to make sure that you’d be getting home, even after we’d found you, but what eventually occurred to me was that I like taking care of girls. I like taking care of girls and kissing girls and having very close friendships with girls that may as well be romantic relationships, so yeah, I probably was kind of a lesbian. I carried that knowledge around with me for another year, trying to get comfortable with it, before anything came of it.

I’m pretty sure we never talked about any of that.

I’m also pretty sure that I was pretty sure that you were a little bit gay, and we never talked about that, either, though my suspicions were confirmed years later after you confessed that you’d slept with a yoga instructor. (We all did hot yoga together later. I’m still sad that the studio closed.)

I have a lot of important memories of you. I can’t explain why some of them are important to me. I sometimes crave the oatmeal bars that you used to make. You gave one to me one day when I was really, really hungry when I was working at the library. I don’t know why that sticks out in my memory. I always want to ask you for the recipe for those oatmeal bars but then I forget or just don’t do it. Listening to you tell me things that you didn’t tell other people is an important memory. Not being able to sleep, watching film adaptations of plays is important. Thanksgiving at your house was the best Thanksgiving I’ve ever had. And the day that you gave me a glass of wine and I just bitched about Kay, I remember Q left me a really nice voicemail and I listened to it in your living room while you cooked something in a pan, and I felt really okay, like I was free to hate Kay and to hate everyone else I’d ever dated and everyone else in the world and it didn’t matter because genuinely nice people who deserved my attention were giving me theirs.

I feel bad for not responding to your letter sooner. Sometimes large pieces of time pass by unaccounted for in my life. That’s another thing that I don’t have an explanation for. I wish that you were still here or that I’d applied to grad school and ended up somewhere close to you because I like that we can exist separately from each other and then run into each other and listen to each other like no time has passed and it was just yesterday that we were both up at 4 AM on the Honors floor, completely unable to make ourselves sleep. I also like knowing that you’re okay because you’re important to me, and I will be there for you every time you fall in or out of love or find yourself unable to sleep or need someone to get you home safely, if you need me to be.

I hope that you’re okay.

Love Always,

Stella

Dear Judy Moody,

I hope that you marry him because I really can’t think of a worse punishment than that.

I hope that you devote your life to having his unwanted children, cleaning up everyone’s messes, crying about never having enough to make ends meet. I hope that you get pregnant, and he doesn’t force you to get an abortion this time. I hope that you keep it and quit your job at the mall to stay home with it, while he picks up extra shifts at Max and Erma’s Casual Dining Restaurant, partially to pay the rent for your one-bedroom shithole apartment and partially because he dreads coming home to his bloated, bitchy, accusing wife. I hope that when he stays out for a shift beer with the new, blonde 18-year-old cocktail waitresses, you’re at home losing your mind, like always.

I hope that you know when you pick up the phone to call me and tell me about how much it hurts, I’m going to press “ignore.” I’ll be at home, more money than I know what to do with, head full of meaningful conversations, heart full of love, and I’ll be giving all of that to anyone who isn’t you. I’m doing what I should’ve done when we were 17 and cutting you out, cutting you off, getting rid of all of my love for you, and pushing it off on anyone who will take it because chances are, they’re more deserving.

So there it is, that’s my plan. That’s why I haven’t screamed at you or thrown your things out on the lawn. I’m just waiting for you to do the damage yourself. Because god knows, you’ll make yourself more miserable than anything I could do to you ever would. I’m setting you free to fuck yourself over and wallow in your unhappiness. And knowing that you’re going to turn into your mother—a bitter, sad, withered woman—makes me happier than putting your head on a spike ever could. 

Love, 

T.N.

Dear man in the Walmart parking lot,

Dear man in the Walmart parking lot who asked me if I like to party and then tried to win me over by spraying me with Ed Hardy perfume when I said, "Not with you,"

Ladies don’t like that.

Sincerely, 
Me

The Will

When I am dead, my dearest,
fill a Dixie cup with wine for me.
Don't volunteer to hire the priest,
some stranger to recite pretty lies in my honor.
Don't go to the funeral at all.
Pull the petals off the roses
you bought to comfort my family,
put those petals in a silk bag,
save them,
use them to seduce a misty-eyed brunette
in a little black dress.
Bake your feelings into a cake,
not one from a box;
your feelings require real butter and real chocolate,
not powder and just add water.
Eat it by yourself, all in one sitting.
Eat it with your hands. Don't use a plate.
Your feelings are too messy for forks and knives and napkins.
Stay home and write bad poetry.
Buy a typewriter,
tell yourself you'll use it
to write one haiku per day,
place it on your desk,
let it gather dust,
let it take up space you could use
for something more productive
in memory of me.

Undearest/Dearest

You didn't give me nothing.
You gave me a character,
you gave me a story to tell,
which means more to me
than any love
you could've shown me.

For Rico, Jack's Last Request

When I am dead, my dearest Rico, please do not attend the funeral.
Please, do not squeeze yourself into that black dress on my account.
Do not spend days agonizing over which wig to wear—the black,
pinstraight bob says mourning but the blonde Goldie Hawn looks so
good on. Please, my darling Rico, don't plaster over your eye brows
and paint new ones on your glittering brow bones. Don't go with the
gold eye shadow. Don't wear that same red lipstick that you wore the
last time that we kissed. Oh, god, Rico, and please, whatever you do,
do not make a speech. Do not mingle with my family and friends at the
memorial, and then halfway through the service, don't stand up and blurt
out some bullshit about how you were the true love of my life. Do not get
into a catfight with my wife over my casket. Do not get into a who-can-sob-
louder-and-is-therefore-more-emotionally-distressed-by-this-event-and-
therefore-loved-me-more match with my mother. Remember, Rico, you are
a lady. My lady. Do not introduce yourself to my boss as, "Coco, a very
close friend of Jack's," emphasis on the close. My darling, Rico, whatever
you do, do not have one of your episodes upon seeing my in my coffin.
Do not grab my lifeless body by the lapels and sob about how I was taken
from you too soon. Do not get on your knees in that cocktail dress. Do not
rip off your matching vintage hat—the one with the little netted veil—and
throw it across the room before balling up your fists and beating the ground
hysterically and shouting, "Whywhywhy!" Please, Rico, if you ever loved
me at all, then when I am dead, my dearest, please stay at home. Do not
change out of the silk bathrobe I bought you in Barcelona. Do not do your
makeup. Do not do your hair. Do not leave the house. Order in from Harry's.
Buy yourself two desserts. (Don't pretend you're worried about getting fat;
you always eat mine, anyway.) Drink that champagne we've been saving.
Drink it right out of the bottle. Put on Funny Girl. Watch it three times and
recite all of the words. (I won't be there to let your know how annoying
it is when you do that.) Don your fur-lined slippers in my honor. Cry if you
must, but only if you must. Take comfort in knowing that I was naked in your
arms, and everything else that I ever did was just drag, part of a persona. Get
angry that the love of your life was so artificial, if you must. Call for more
champagne. Watch Funny Girl again. Fall asleep. Wake up. Take two
aspirin with a glass of water. Pull the covers over your head. Close your
eyes. Start to feel better.

To My Dearest Red Dress,

I hope that when you hug her wine-bottle body you never look cheap.

I hope that her Wonderbra and refusal to wear panties never make you uncomfortable.

I hope that when she pulls you down

a bit to expose her breasts to the bartender, you don’t

take it personally.

I hope that before she whines, “Time to go,” she doesn’t spill half of her

drink on your soft fabric.

I hope that once you’ve been clumsily tossed into the darkest

corner of her closet, she doesn’t forget about you.

I hope that she doesn’t pick up a new dress that looks exactly like you

but in black next week.

I hope that her hand-me-down love is worth it.

Always,

Your Mannequin 

Dearest,

A million billion people connected through the press of a button, and everyone feels alone. Why is that?

All the kids are killing themselves. There's something with this generation and crying suicide. Maybe we don't know how else to get someone's attention. Nothing's shocking anymore. Better to cry fire than to cry rape, even better to chase a bottle of pills with a bottle of vodka and to call everyone you know asking for a ride to the hospital, and even better yet to slash your wrists horizontally, pretending you didn't know there was a wrong way. It's that much more dramatic if blood's involved. People still come running for blood, right?

In place of friends and lovers, I've had six dozen depressed acquaintances who've taken me for a therapist or a 24-hour suicide hotline or one of those squeezable stress balls. Because that's what I've learned that true love is: letting someone else use you up, swallow you down like a bottle of antidepressants, until you're empty but they feel better and then they can throw you away. I may as well have a dosage tattooed on my ribcage because I give away true love to nearly everyone I meet.

Of course, I hear a scream, and I come running every time. And I don't complain because to complain about someone asking for your help when they really need it would be callous, and I'm not. I'm getting more cynical, but I could never be callous.

I've known two people who've actually gone through with it. Maybe one and a half. The second was an overdose, possibly an accident, but I kind of feel that if you're in a place where doing a lot of heroin seems like a good idea, you must know that dying comes with the territory and, for some reason or another, you must at least sort of be okay with that.

Proportionally, one and a half successful suicides does not even almost compare to the number of threats and attempts I've seen, but this is one of those times where I can't think like an economist because percentages and statistics don't easily translate into human lives.

I'm almost used up because almost no one gives back the amount that they take, and the weight of not giving, of not caring, on my conscious is heavy enough to break me. So, I'm out of commission either way.

Tell me, dearest, what's a clown to do?

Very Much Love,
Pagliacci

Dear woman who comes to PJ's every day and sits for hours at the only outdoor table near an outlet

I hate you. I hate your unsmiling, sunburned face. I hate your cigarette smoke. I hate your pudgy hands, which aren't even usually typing away on your laptop. I hate the way that your computer could not possibly need to be charging for all six of the hours you're at the coffee shop, but you keep it plugged in anyway so that anyone who needs to charge their computers has to go inside, even though it's cold inside. I probably don't hate you because I've never talked to you. I think I've made eye contact with you once, and you had a rude look on your face, so that must count for something. Maybe hate is too strong a word, but woman who comes to PJ's every day and doesn't share the outdoor table near the outlet, I strongly dislike you and wish that you would go away because other people's computers need charging too.

Upon seeing the 17 hits on my page from your hometown on Thanksgiving

What are you doing here, you sadist?

What's wrong with you?

Get back to your donut hole goddess and stop checking in for any hint of you in my thoughts.

Get back to your any-soft-body-will-do redemption,
get back to your pathological lies,
get back to telling yourself that you're shy and introverted,
get back to never ever shutting the fuck up,
get back to never being able to be alone,

get back to shameless flirting with a sex you're not interested in,
get back to art for the sake of getting unsuspecting girls naked,
get back to the pornography that you try to pass off as poetic,
get back to transparent attempts to get girls' attention,
get back to objectifying and degrading attractive women,

get back to pretending to have read or watched or played or heard anything that you think will make you in some way desirable,
get back to your pseudo-intellectualism,
get back to trying to impress her with your borrowed opinions,
get back to revising your personality according to your new love interests' preferences,

get back to custom-tailoring your likes and dislikes to what you think she wants in a soul mate,
get back to passing off old songs and drawings as special,
get back to telling her she's the only one and she's amazing,
get back to your lazy, fragile devotion,
get back to forgetting who your friends were,

get back to guilting your roommate into buying you food,
get back to spending all your money on shoes,
get back to tricking old lovers into doing your laundry,
get back to relying on your parents and telling yourself you're grown up,
get back to your hypocrisy,

get back to self-consciousness about your homemade scars,
get back to blaming them on anything that sounds plausible yet pitiable,
get back to threatening to kill yourself when things don't work out the way you planned,
get back to thinking you're justified in all of your actions,
get back to selfish obsession,

get back to slandering old flames because they've realized that you're psychotic,
get back to pretending to be drunk so that you can have an excuse to act like a psychopath,
get back to pretending like you'd thought of proposing to me,
get back to pretending like you had a ring for me,
get back to trying to make our story all the more pathetic,

get back to telling yourself that I'm awful because I couldn't love you the way you wanted,
get back to villainizing me because I will smash any pedestal I'm placed on,
get back to pretending to be happy for me,

get out, get out, get out.

Dear Anyone Listening,

I never want children.
I could never tuck my babies in at night, knowing that someday they would have to grow up and stop being afraid of the monsters under their beds, and that, of course, someday they would begin inviting the monsters into their beds.

To my ink-stained darling,

You were made of bones

only thinner, like thread

only tougher, like leather

only brighter, like branches

only loud, like love,

but you were not 

any of these things, 

not really. 

I was made of plaster, 

only thicker, like blood

only fragile, like feathers

only whiter, like paper

only soft, like love,

but I was not 

any of these things, 

not quite. 

We were made of hope,

only thinner, like tethers

only fragile, like lead

only lighter, like blindness

only ugly, like love, 

but we were not

anything, 

not anything at all. 

Dear Lia,

Lia, I am writing because our stories are gone. They were erased in a shameful fit of sanity, but now that I'm mad again, I need them.
I know that our stories can't come back because you've erased every trace of me, painted over me with thick, white acrylic to make room for something with fewer flaws.
This leaves me to tape up my mouth and bind my hands. This leaves me to chew my tongue and scar my palms with half-moon grooves. This leaves me to bite my nails 'til they bleed, just to keep my hands and mouth too busy to signal something significant.
When it gets dark, I light a candle to you; I wrap my arms around my body straightjacket-style and try to remember what came after once upon a time. The things I remember are better than the things we erased—no grabbing for gold, no accommodating the enemy, no star-crossing, just lovers. And this is the way that it should be. A soft madness cradles me to sleep.

Always,
Desirée

Dear Kit,

I know you're gone gone gone, dead and reborn as someone else's Robin Hood someone else's Cyrano someone else's Paolo someone else's Lancelot. The two of you rode off into the sunset, and you're still honeymooning. I know you told me once that your kind doesn't get happily ever afters. "Watch the movies," you said. "We always die in the end." 

And everyone is dead. They've been reborn in the same bodies, but the people I loved aren't in there anymore. They're all hermit crabs, and I'm in love with the shells. 

I know this, that you're gone. I tell myself that my Kit is dead dead dead and not coming back. I tell myself Kit's a new person happily ever after in the same old body, and I say to myself, my Kit is a shell made of watercolor and cotton and fragmented thoughts that lives in a box dead dead dead and buried in my mind. 

I know you can't come back. I could play Frankenstein or wish upon a monkey's paw, but you'd still be all wrong. I know this. I know this. I know this, but knowing doesn't stop the wanting. 

Always, 

Carmilla 

Dear Kitten,

I think that we are mad, and we will never stop being mad. 

We will never stop because once you've tasted madness, nothing else tastes as good. 

When we reach for our keys, when we go walking, when we wake up in the morning, we think, "Maybe today," when we should not be thinking at all. 

Nothing feels as soft. Nothing smells the same. Nothing makes me cringe like when I'm mad with you. 

We are meeting, laughing, talking, writing, dressing, talking, talking, too much crying, sleeping, holding, laughing, writing, reading, breaking, leaving, crying, crying, crying, together, alone, writing. 

We do this in real time, setting fire to each other's insanity again and again, timed like a circus act. 

We are most alive in the back of our minds. It feels like home to us. 

We make our beds of memories and we lie in them and lie and lie and lie, too afraid of the dark to wake up. 

Dear Jinx,

If I had the audacity, I would cover your life in yellow roses. Every day I would litter your walkways with fresh flowers to trample. I would dissect a perfectly good posy just to pile the petals onto your bed, make you a nest of something soft and alive. I would keep myself a secret. I would learn to make masks out of marigolds and morning glories. I would learn to be two-hundred different people, and all two-hundred of us would spend all 4,800 of each day's hours knitting you a brighter life out of daisy stems.  We would learn to hide under rocks. We would learn to thrive in shadows. We would learn that transformations are easy, if the weather allows. We would live and die weaving you a sunflower dream from behind a fat oak tree, watching you read on the bench nearby. We would use up our 6 trillion breaths on sighs so that you never had to waste yours because I know that you've spent a lot of time sighing already. We would do all of that for you, the one, the only one. I would do it for you. But I won't risk it on the all-too-likely off-chance that you'll pick up all my yellow rose petals and piece them back together in the shape of a mask that perfectly fits my face.

Dearest Dearest,

Your name is the lowest of low blow insults in this home. Your words are something we crowd around to laugh at. Your desperate lunacy makes up the for the fact that we do not have cable.  Your lies are the punchlines of our favorite jokes.  Your theft nourished our nerve endings, made them grow like vines, now completely wild, our bodies overrun, unable to escape.  We thank you for the entertainment. We sincerely believe that it's brought us together, and for that, we cannot express our gratitude.