seaside

if i had a home to take you to

i would show you the lake where i learned how to swim

my father and i at the edge of the dock, my pink bathing suit

sagging at the crotch and threadbare

i would tell you how i shook, and cried, and  was so very scared

of the dark and glassy water

and how my father grew angry

i couldn't move, so he picked me up and jumped feet-first

into the icy cold where we bobbed like pale, bloated driftwood

and i screamed until he pulled me out

there would be the shore that we could walk along

not sandy, but pebbled and strewn with rotting kelp

we would stand and let the water roll up onto our feet

and through the fog we would pretend to see

any proof that i'm not still afraid

if i only had a home to take you to

you could know me better, and more completely

but i am more like a ghost than a girl

lacking history, defined edges, permanence

so when i lay on my back in the black of the water

you cannot tell me from the waves

i want you to unpack me as if i were a suitcase that you could fill with your essentials (a toothbrush, dull razor, a change of underwear) and lug behind you to your next destination.  i want you to unpack me and remove the clothes that have remained crumpled behind my pillow, under my bed, shoved into drawers and stowed away in the back of my closet.  i want you to remove the things i cannot remove myself.  i have become so full of time and trinkets, objects and reminiscing of past days that i cannot see the ground beneath my feet. i need you to unpack me.  i need to be empty so that you can fill me.  there is not yet room for anyone new, no space here for your hands, or your mouth, or the stories you tell me in slurred whispers late into the night.  on the train, you shove me into the overhead storage compartment and the door will not shut over my folded legs.  you push, and i cry, there is no room.  i make myself smaller.  exhale again and shrink my lungs into something more manageable; i fold into myself.  you shove again.  in a quick burst i tell you, i loved a man who fucked another woman, and there is space again in me.  i am smaller.  i tell you, my best friend died and i cannot pass his house.  i am smaller.  i tell you, i slept with a man who did not love me.  i am smaller.  i exhale, and there is less of me to store away.  you close the door, and in the dark, i smile.  the train pulls away from the station and i count the seconds as the wheels race bumpy over rusty tracks and below, you accept a drink from the cart and crunch the ice between your teeth.

at times, i feel like a pool of water.  behind my eyes, it is glassy and clear, and when i am still, and quiet, it behaves the same.  into that space a thought comes and it falls, plip, into the pool.  ripples move outward through my limbs and i can feel the tips of my fingers buzz and my toes hum.  my body is liquid, sliding under the cracks of doors and puddling up in the unfilled potholes on the road leading up to your grandmother's house.  but sometimes, in my head, the calm plip is not a calm plip, it is a torrential fucking downpour and water leaks out of me in ways i cannot control.  i want to build a boat.  it is not the simulation of drowning, it is the actual experience of drowning, your body filling up with thoughts of death that you cannot avoid.