Selfish Girl

If I am being honest, I deserve this. As much as the next person, I deserve the slowest, hardest, vilest death possible, and I deserve you. I deserve the fireplace, the furnace, I deserve the footnotes, I deserve to be reduced to my own faint glow, dimming, dancing, deceiving. There was something there. I was sparkling, spilling out over the horizon. I was golden bliss, in the late afternoon or the lousy morning. Let that be all that I see, when the wheels turn and break. When I am thrown from the foothills of my chariot. Let my last reason be my first, that I love you, and let all things evil and innocent be worth justifying my life over this faint flickering light. Let me forget. Let me learn again, what leaning into flames can feel like, so that with the knowledge I am reborn. As something better, equally worthy, but reformed. A woman reformed. Ash for snow.

It has been years since I felt that kind of heat. I was nine. I was watching the world rotate above me, below me. I saw the clouds, I was the heavens. I was pre-cleavage. Pre-teenage melodrama. There was no such time, believe me. I was always bouldering ecstasy, knifed only by the mountains, I was always old. My sadness was too tall to see, but at least it protected me. It was another lifetime, those younger years, you see. I was sleepy sweetness, my own burden. I was towing my own truck. A shame that you will never know from these descriptions what that felt like. You will never know what car I wanted to drive because I will never tell you, because I never cared about driving. Or I did once. Hopefully you forget about that too. You will never have lived beneath my skin, festering there, feeling your own way out of being alive. How close I got. To be so cold and still beneath your blanket, yours, that everyone thought you were a corpse, but your blanket almost wasn’t yours. You will never have been that kind of sleepless, listening to the stream of sunlight above your head, parting your hair and ploughing your way through every bad lullaby ever written. Eyes red, eyes bleeding, eyes kneeling before the curse. If I am being honest, I deserved that.