Backwards Trajectory

Every night I wash all my dishes and all my clothes. Every last one of them. By hand, no less. So I know it’s done right. So I know they’re clean. How could I not? All I ever wanted was a normal life. Perhaps this is normal enough. Maybe there is no constantly comparing yourself with someone else. Maybe there is no normal – just what is. Maybe there are no truths anymore, no such things, old notions – lost and forgotten. Dusty. Horse-and-buggy thinking. Maybe there’s only opinions, perceptions, pretensions, and lies. Only artifice. I look at the couch, stained with our love. Is anything certain any longer? And in realizing this, I turn and heave a bar stool through the motel room’s sliding glass door and into the pool. Then I spin, point to Janet, and scream: “Crank the Thin Lizzy!!!”

My boyfriend called and
Said he spotted a guy while driving
Face timing a woman and watching porn at the same time
The two women mirroring each other
Pleasure and convenience merging
Something darker than sympathy rose
I pretended it didn’t bother me
Dismissed it with the stresses and victories of our humble day
Parking brake on in a vacant lot,
The sun painted my cheek with her warmth
Shielding my eyes from the harsh presence
My amazement blocking our conversation
How women can be labeled as satisfaction over being
How intention and focus can impersonate
His possible girlfriend reviewing her pain and stress
Wins and excitement,
To be overrun by another girl
Opening her mouth and accepting a man’s exchange
On the same screen
Horror overrides my imagination, replacing visions of my boyfriend
Her lips robbing my future
My insecurities ripping his integrity
Letting myself unravel into the leather driver seat
Establishing a new fear
I sigh and tell him I love him
Maybe I am just like that woman
Sitting and accepting
Sharing the silence and the mystery
If I am enough
To be both women

I said I would name my child “Driftwood,” “Drifter” for short. I was only having fun.
“You should take this seriously, you may be a mother some day and it’ll be up to you
how your child turns out,” Jane said. We were in sixth grade.
I liked naming things back then. I had lists of names for horses, dogs, cats, even
parakeets. Even children. The possibilities in naming, in deciding how someone would be known, is a mysterious and important task.
Maybe Jane was right. I should have said “Avery” which means counselor, sage, wise. Or
“Brannon,” strong, or “Sasha,” the protector and helper of mankind. Or “Vito,” alive, life.
Instead, I named my son for his father. Wendell. Wanderer. A better name than one that
means “stricken with an incurable childhood illness that will slowly leach away his life until
there is nothing left but the miserable shell of a child for whom death is a blessing.”
Better than my own name, Dolores, woman of sorrows.

for Leah

I left Seattle because my friends were dying.
Nathan O.D.’d.
Rebel drove into a wall.
Pale Mary suicided down in California.
Kristal got killed in front of the Jack in the Box.
That was where Lindsey was shot the year before.
Mia — everybody knows about Mia.

Nathan O.D.’d. We were sitting around. We watched him shoot. He knew he was doing
too much. We knew, too. But none of us said anything, and Nathan … he knew what he
was doing. He was smiling, and then he fell over. The needle was still in his arm.
That was it, really. That was what told me to get out of Seattle.

What happened to Mia, too. Everybody knows what happened to Mia.

My mother thinks I ran because somebody molested me, or worse. Maybe somebody in
the family. Maybe my uncle or my cousin.

That never happened. I ran because my friends were dying.

Portland’s OK.

I am yet to exist—
Self, a construct,
Living my life before I do.
Soon enough,
Self must remember this upon waking:
Tears can turn dreams into—
The difference between
An empty stomach in a white-elephant home
And a full stomach in an unfurnished space.
Pity is a stench
You may wear for a while,
But even that can be transformed—
Into forgiveness of oneself.
Please.
Self carries too much guilt.
Shed some,
To walk a mile toward success.
This is the beginning.