I had heard people say,
“The beginning is just a fantasy.”
“The first hit (the second, fourth, the hundredth)
all rainbows and being lifted so high you question
if you’ve gone past the boundaries of the sky—
a hallucination.
Yet from me it was still:
“I want you here, like this,
just there, forever,
tucked into the nook of my neck,
and inside my back pocket,
the crease where my waist meets my hip, too,
and inside my ear, and behind it, if you can,
and within me, in here, deep.”
You never said it back.
To me, you in all my spaces said enough.
But incongruity is a sly enemy,
convincing in its mask:
As the clown I knew I should bow at the feet of
at that fifth birthday party,
the squeak of the dachshund that materialized, poof,
from a limp rubber balloon;
As the lilac tutu I knew to prance proudly in
at that first recital,
the slippers dyed to match,
catching my eye as I pointed,
trying to remember,
reminding me that this—
me, today—
is something big;
As the Big-Apple-Red polish
for prom,
for Annabelle’s wedding,
and Molly’s,
and Heather’s, too,
and the silver on my eyelids
and the Spanx under my dress;
As all of it convinced all of me
that it would all always be
as good,
as true,
as this.
I couldn’t have known, then,
when days were like candy,
sweet and filling,
to be both shared and hoarded,
both carrying you somewhere else
and planting you wholly in this place,
I couldn’t have known that the clown
would make me cry as his makeup came off,
that my feet would fail the choreography,
that the polish would chip before the main event,
every time.
That all that,
all that made me fall in love in the beginning,
that made me sure forever was a thing,
that made me need that hit—
that hit,
that hit,
that hit—
That all that was given would be taken away
by he who gives.
I couldn’t have known that you were,
from the beginning, a monster,
just waiting in the shadow of my devotion.
That your fickleness, Life, is the only thing
in which I should have ever placed my faith.