What I am trying to say is I love you, and that I want to. What I am trying to say is it’s become nearly impossible to know how to love you well.

Something in your face shrinks, recedes behind your eyes. They go glassy. Flat. In speaking I have forgotten hearing. What I am trying to say is that I don’t even know what you hear from me anymore. What I am trying to say is that you don’t listen.

So I may shrink back away for a couple of weeks–I’m not sure how working this play out will impact my posting here. But I’ll be looking for readers soon, and you should let me know if & as you’re available to read it & offer your thoughts. You can reach me at aubreyh at gmail.

In my work, I try not to talk about love. Supporters say “love is love,” and talk about their weddings, children, Thanksgivings, how things could change, how they could be valued and understood. It’s how they feel it; it is the loss they know; it makes sense to them.

But I say it is about surefootedness, about knowing that the ground beneath each of us will stay stable, and that we won’t feel the steady rumble of tectonic betrayal. That we don’t have to be the sad strangers suspended on display in the atmosphere, while the heavy blanket of gravity keeps everyone else earthbound and steady. That is the reason I shudder at shadows and flinch at touch, the reason I won’t call the doctor, the reason I confide in lawyers like priests. That is the reason I wake up so early and think so hard. That is the loss I feel. That makes sense to me.

And it makes sense to you, too. And that’s why I can’t do without you.

::

poem for my brother.

I wrote a poem after my brother said,
“hey you need to
get less done
have more fun”
like the two
were mutually exclu
sive.

See, I love the boy, but
I don’t believe what he professes,
what he stresses
when he addresses me.

I wrote a poem for my brother and all the my brothers out there
who plant binaries like flags,
who read dichotomies like Chricton,
who pray at night ‘n’ murmur
day/night
black/white
early/late
gay/straight
boy/girl
me/world
latent/DSM
patient/us-and-them

and maybe it’s the first time he saw me play that hand,
but I did it grand, I shouted a demand:
NO.

I wrote a poem for the two of us as children,
Saturday morning cartoon viewers
with heads stuck in sewers like sand,
where all we could hear was the steady clap of skin on hand
and the even crack of belt on back.
One body yielding to another.

I wrote a poem for my brother, and now he thinks I am
crazy and wrong
lazy and don’t belong
histrionic and borderline
But maybe I’m just sardonic and have a spine.

I wrote a poem for all the diagnoses I line up like domino credentials behind my name.

I wrote a poem like building a house of cards, fragile and large, out of my prescriptions.

I wrote a poem to find out what makes me a woman,
but I could only find my place in negative space.

“Wears skirts and flirts” does not make me a woman.
“Prevents spills and smells” does not make me a woman.

Liquid eye-liner
Click-clack typewriter
Midnight bus-rider
does not make me a woman.

“Boyfriend” does not make me a woman because his
hair cut
beer gut
thin lip
slim hip
square frame
boy name
is not enough to make him a boy
friend.

I wrote a poem to all the poems beaten from that body like feathers,
Tethered
by a man who wanted it dead or punished or just
Disappeared, who
Reared this human from day one,
the gay one,
the wrong body,
or maybe just a corpse,
the sort that warps,
the kind with a tectonic topography
that calls for an eclipse or an apocalypse.

I wrote a poem for the hand that descended on skin and bones
like thumping tomes.
I wrote a poem.

I wrote a poem for the hand that put on the brakes,
the man that made no mistakes,
the heavy fist,
the scarred wrist.

I wrote a poem to explain why I flinch every time I hear
lips smack on lips or skin.

I wrote a poem for the fist that drove us crazy for the
fathers that called us lazy for the
wardens that hemmed us in for the
bodies that made us sin.

I wrote a poem for the orderlies that made us orderly.

I wrote a poem for the doctors that gave us diagnoses,
the diagnoses that made us kids,
then hid the treatment behind child-locked lids
and in medical books
in sentences that read like dirty looks.

Can I diagram a give-a-damn?

I wrote a poem for my brother that means
nothing to my brother because
I wrote a poem that only gets published in the margins of
public school textbooks and in bathroom stalls
in the sorts of buildings that have bathroom stalls.

I wrote a poem because all that theory left me leery,
because all those essays just helped me tread water,
keep my head above the surface,
keep from drowning in an ocean of
kinship and prescription slips.

Or maybe I wrote a poem to build a city at the bottom of the Atlantic,
an Atlantis, just for those of us who are drowning.
Just some verse like a shot for downing.

I wrote a poem as a toast to life after death.

Maybe I don’t.

There is something about the life I lead that is grotesque: peels away the skin, lifts veins, organs and muscle in bas relief; paints them for instructional purposes. A deadened face, forever frozen in a scream, a gag, an unposed question. A body stopped and shellacked, prostrate, having died just beyond its will. Unsettling as public crying. It would all be so valuable if someone could look, could keep from looking away.

My profession, too, exposes the scaly underbelly of an underfunctional ideology, taxidermies grotesque experiences of a system that serves those decision-makers (judges, lawmakers, the middle class) that were my classmates. Does not lend itself to the vacuum of polite conversation amongst other well-to-do motherfuckers.

That stretch, the one from me to five years ago, couldn’t happen this morning. I sat at a wedding reception and became so painfully aware of my body, my hometown, the steady drip of my paycheck, my desperate and adoring attachment to my family—all the things I love so well, such a sudden reminder of shame.

Yes, my spine has grown to mimic the gentle geology and steady curvature of the cradle mountains, and my heavy body fell quickly into a restless sleep when its bones found their jigsaw match. When I awake, I will find myself unceremoniously dropped from the mountains’ summit: neither elected to office nor discussed any way but pityingly. And me and my mangled bones will have slept through a happy life, our dead eyes and frozen face staring lovingly up at the gentle mountain that held us so fast and dropped us so hard.

How strange to know your fate. How giddy and stalwart to sleep through it.

But lately the love of my life has become a delicate hurricane, leaving so much doll-sized destruction in his precise little wake. Or maybe he is now a nervous child: rocks back and forth, side to side, comforting himself, and leaving a snow angel wasteland. I watch, fascinated, pulling closer, until I catch the ricochet, and then the full force of his bullet. There is no metaphor, is there? None to convey that gentle betrayal: the excruciating feeling of watching the pulp of your obliterated heart and lungs spill out of you, feeling such a full-body pain, and knowing with your whole being that none of it was intentional.

Maybe the dam of his dead and watery eyes has burst. Maybe he will return soon, repentant and whole. Maybe he will need me, and maybe he will say so. Maybe he will return the favor, speak from the heart that must be there and overflowing. Maybe he really is like me, full of regret and love and mourning and dissonance. Maybe he has come to terms; maybe he could. Is this what I should have expected all along, living with such a mighty little addict?

So a poltergeist makes sense, and echoes are safest. This is how we find god, isn’t it? It’s such a deep dive into our atavistic urge, and such a tidy dismissal of others’. He’s not all there is, that delicately sculpted face and doll’s eyes. But he’s the biggest mystery I haven’t given up on.

But I had felt so sure that in the swift, certain motion of that day-to-day, minute-to-minute, I’d find something solid. Between the resonant echo of high heels on slick floors, I knew I’d have some true north. Not this. Not the subtle buoyancy that expands to fit the spaces between paralyzing grief. Not the mania of a weekday afternoon or the catatonia of Sunday stasis. Not six years of the same songs of longing for the same six girls. Not such a deep pit of grief at twenty-two.

And not the falling sensation of surrendering my aching muscles to even more growth. Not the things you tell me over cocktails that facilitate some radical, clandestine metamorphosis. Not the warm pressure of leaning on myself for more, better. Not the steady trajectory of an unwavering upward glance. Not what you’ve given me, and never the empty space it can’t seem to fill.

Something sweeping. Something about light and longing and swimming. I remember feeling that way: suspended and unstoppable. Gigantic and everywhere. In love with four girls all at once, and certain that any one of them could have steadied the hand I’d wrapped around my trigger of a heart. Seeing a street as the sea, and a crosswalk as a teetering rope bridge. This city was epic and insurmountable, and I was its fearless explorer, claiming its every mountaintop in the name of–what?

But I had become my own Aristophanes; the bar was set impossibly high, and I’d put it there myself. And after some shiver-shake withdrawals, I’m facing the city in the cold, swinging, dim light of sobriety, and all the quiet deprivation and disappointment that comes along with it. I can’t seem to see anything well enough to know where it ends and I begin.

In a Jar from elrobozo on Vimeo.

And here’s his band, Le Switch (he’s on bass):

And suddenly it’s three years later. Today, I was closer to my perfect body, to my sainted self than I’ve ever been, and then you called. A static buzz and an interruption in conversion of life and vows of stability. The smoke and overheat of remembering your slanted ceiling in winter. The shattering backfire of your question, loud as it was then. Close as my passenger seat in the rain. The white roar between call and response.

I will do what you ask me to do because of how I feel about you.

A beat of feeling my face redden. I was no less angry, and it was no less true, but I felt the rising tide of my realization of the severity and intensity of what I’d said.

It took nine conversations to drain the residue from my dirty mouth. It wasn’t until the tenth that I found an audience with the prophet I’m learning to love. He offered the gentle, generous truth that people are stupid, sweet and sad. He knows us as a breed destined to become strays, but maybe stray together. He holds us against the warm light of the projector and dutifully recites what he sees there.

And then it was so quiet, and I was calmer than I’d ever been. From birth, my head would whir and overheat, break down like my straining body. And then, so suddenly, white noise. Nothing disappeared, and no oasis wished itself into being. Everything was real and solid and soft and I knew what to want.

If my prayer be not humble, make it so.

When my father first got hearing aids, he was angry with everything, and he’d never say why. When he returned them, the audiologist told him that they didn’t need adjusting, he did. “You’ve become accustomed to your quiet world.” So maybe that’s me, too. I didn’t anticipate needing this much courage to take a phone call, or stand up in the morning.

I need some courage from you now. You, the real you, not the sinking bones on an overgrown hill. Not a photograph of you, or a tape of your voice. The you that breathes and talks and catches me. The you that chokes up unexpectedly, that swears like a sailor, that swings hard, that speaks confidently. This is the steady settling in of what I was always afraid would come to pass: I can’t make it without you.

I missed my mother, for real this time. I remembered my grandfather and thought of him–the fact of him, the flesh of him, the heavy hole where he was–for the first time in months. I let the weight of my brother (the flatline dialtone) hang in the air like humidity, breathed it in.

I hadn’t left all this in the hopes of wishing it away. No–I’d held onto it, held and rationed it like halloween candy. Because I know that when your heart breaks, it breaks open, like a pomegranate or an anemone, and everything inside it is hungry and soft and free. And now that sweet and gentle has opened just enough for me to leave, and I will. I own every bell that tolls me.