Tough guy

I saw a girl drive up to the cafe with a fish surfboard and sunglasses and a black oversized shirt. It reminded me of you. I wanted to be like her, to surf better. I wanted to be like you, tough guy. Always free, always going outside and cutting down trees or surfing with your friends who lived on tents on the beach, instead of crying in bed like me. Making new friends and new lovers instead of remembering the same man like me. Going to parties and not writing from the desk in my room like me, looking at the light fading from the ocean.

You said we were a good pair. You had no mother too. You smiled with your yellow missing teeth. You held me when I couldn’t fall asleep. Your ex lovers were all broken just like me you said but I was both soft and strong. We picked out clothes at the thrift store and drove all around the country searching for someone to love us both, and you always took the spotlight away from me. When I got so tired of us, I cried for the hospital my family never brought me to, and you could only pretend to cry, howling like a cartoon wolf. You took turns worshipping me and mocking me. Throwing yourself at me and throwing yourself at other women. We were hunting, searching, kicking and crawling, for your mother, my mother, the one perfect mother, that raging fire burning nitrogen-cold, turning your fingers black, emptying your stomach with its relentless hunger.

Last night I held myself and whispered that I will love myself in all the ways my mom didn’t. Oh my precious girl, I would do anything for you my precious girl. I frantically grabbed my own shoulders to keep from drifting into pieces. Like an animal, like a robber in someone else’s room. I screamed into the big empty house. The night, Kali, the death mother goddess, took my screams. I gave it all to her. I chose to step into the endless pain, that void of existing, knowing how frightening this world would be without my mother, without my illusions. I decided to walk that road anyways, with no promise ahead of me, no one to love me back, no one to catch me except these two skinny arms with no torso other than my own, the one that was on fire, the one that hurt to touch.

Tough guy. This was the path you couldn’t stomach. You weren’t tough enough for this. You were always clinging to me like a fading almost-kitten. Almost fully alive, clinging to my stomach with your claws, your monstrous fingers in my hair, shoving me to the ground. Cutting open the soles of my feet on the rocks of your yard. Tough guy, so afraid, so so very afraid. Your hands covered in tattoos shaking when the police served you the restraining order. I am always afraid, but so much tougher than you.