HOLLOW AND STUPID AND BROKEN AND SHREDDED
Questions for the public after my very logical breakup
“Unsex me here… and take my milk for gall.”
How do you grow out of someone who helped you grow up?
How do you eat when he taught you how to taste?
How do you keep it sacred without turning yourself cold?
How do you look at someone else’s feet that aren’t his feet? That are shaped differently. That are the wrong shape.
When will you be able to go to the culinary store to buy the pink apron you want? Last time you were there, it was you and him, mingling with dangled steel and silicon, debating if the prices were worth it.
Is it wrong if you drink and feel good? Is it wrong if you don’t cry when you’re drunk? Is it wrong if you do?
Is it that you want him here, or is it that you never learned to be alone and peaceful?
Considering you had never experienced peace before him, will you figure out how to provide that peace towards yourself? Or will you always need some big-armed body as a supplement?
Do you need to be protected from yourself? And if so, is it a permanent condition?
Do reminders of him make you nauseous, or does nausea remind you of his departure?
You asked to keep his hoodie, but will you ever be able to wear it without throwing up?
Will certain colors always be his? Will certain shapes always be his?
Will what you see now as stone-cold remnants of him be watered back down into clay and refashioned into other vessels?
How do you go out in the clothes he bought you?
How do you sit on the furniture he brought into your house?
How do you see a future without reducing him, blaming him, dismissing him?
How do you recognize that part of what you’ve lost is something that was always lost, even before him?
How do you recognize that part of your pain is simply the primary, pre-existing loneliness returning, unsmothered by a film of companionship?
How do you sit still?
Did you ever know how to sit still, even before him?
How do you walk up your street from where it ended, without remembering what that passing stranger asked as you tread forward, crying like a hurt animal?
“Is your man leaving? Is your man leaving?”
How do you make sure you aren’t treating other people as surrogates? How do you keep the water in those wells clean?
When will you be able to look at another body and not see it as a false icon?
When will you stop being so fucking Platonic about his form?
How do you speak without hearing him as part of your voice?
How do you wash the rice without thinking of the person who taught you to wash the rice?
How do you tell people that this made you stronger, that this is a good wound, and then tell them that you wouldn’t wish this kind of love on anyone else?
How do you clarify that you loved each other? That the love was still there. That it didn’t stop.
How do you keep growing up, without him? How do you counter the feeling that tells you that you’re fully grown?
How do you stop wishing for perfection? For totality?
How do you forgive yourself for your hunger? How do you forgive yourself for not finding anyone or anything to be enough, before, during, and after?
How do you stop wishing to be normal?
How do you discern what’s pathological and what’s just to be mediated with a well-rounded lifestyle?
When do you start to be free in your own city?
Why do you only understand what something is after it’s gone, and you can only trace the hole it left with an endless rillet of comparisons?
Comparisons. Always at the corner of your eye, comparisons.
How do you have fun without feeling like you’re procrastinating?
Why did you always need to be honest? Why couldn’t you lie, even with your eyes, hands, or breath?
Is happiness more like a math problem or like a balancing trick?
His body, so neutral and easy. His piss, his sweat. Like fresh spring water.
His eyes. The immediacy, it swallows you.
Why did you cry, so hard and so fast, when he asked you:
“Do you want green tea?”
You wanted him. You traced his hand there, for the first time, in the dark, as you lay over the covers, because you wanted him.
But you had to want more.
You had to want everything.