A good cry blurring the lines

     The wild children in my head pull my hair and tug on my heartstrings.  Their shouting and loose lipped taunting remind me to smile even when it hurts so badly. It is my younger self losing her grip and running like a banshee towards everything that scares me, hitting buttons that were once dormant. 

     My imagination flies as he flickers through my eyelids, he was there and now he’s not.  My mind brews a creative disregard for this impending disappointment.

     My ability to ignore the due date of suffering is what is holding my head up at this dingy hole-in–the-wall bar, neither creepy nor classy, edgy or safe. It is a neutral space, designed for escaping.

     I sink deeper into the pleather swivel chair. It holds me like a goblet of stale wine. My own grief has swept me off my feet.  Mahogany glossed counter tops reflect pint glasses and dribbled whiskey, I am suuure it holds the answers to all of our problems.   Ha. Man if these walls could talk. This whole place would reek of regret.  I stumbled into this dark doorway that is now my favorite place on earth, because it separates me from the heartache waiting right out that damn door.

     “Fill her up Joe, take me away to funky town, ha....to the midnight express....the diamond in the skyyyyy,” I mutter through carbonation but the words fall on deaf ears.

     I’m gathering my courage to hold back tears.  If the bartender asks me how I am one more time, I might just break the fuck down. I might just lean into his stupid face and word vomit all over him and his velvet bow-tie. Spewing vulnerable truths, bludgeoning him with memories of a love long gone. He doesn’t know what’s coming, I can get mean. I can get Honest.

     Last night was when the tear breached into a physical form.  It started under the skin and then cracked open through spaces in my face. I remembered the promises and plans we had that came out in wet streams.  I recalled love bites and sensual conversations between our bodies; I thought it would last forever.  Everything he whispered to me was released through a break, the final moments of knowing it is never the same.

“This isn’t working.”

“I have changed.”

“I feel different.”

“I am moving on a different path.”

     My energy tossed and turned as rejection pounded through me.  The “you are never good enough” mantras on repeat while a swollen, supple face releases the sounds of grief. A girl in paradise filling buckets with home brewed salt water. Tear ducts split like the red sea and all she has is her memory to pull her back into the palms of his greedy hands.  This slimy vacillation between self-pity and self-loathing is exhausting. 

     I paid Joe with 2 twenties and dragged my self out of that bar before letting all my colors show. I felt invincibly invisible. There is a power that can be found in the bottom of a pint glass, I decided to walk away before I found it.  The door hit the backs of my boots as I left and I went home to slam poetry against emotion and sadness against language.

     Sometimes this is what it takes.  A big fat freaking change.  An earth shattering, monumental, kick-in-the-ass, beat her while she’s down, lip splitting, drives her to drink, back cracking, midnight terrors, and sweaty daydream kind of change.  To me it is necessary for this to happen in order to peel back layers of surface level happiness and crack open the raw truth of what it means to be a fully-formed human outside of your own ego, and in this case, a man worshiping lust fest. 

     I faced many demons that night, his form was there, as well as a figure who revealed herself form the shadows of a broken heart.  She was the woman I hid away while I was busy putting someone else's dream at the front of the book.  She was the voice of reason while love swept me into submission.  Choking out breaths and wiping wet eyes, I see her now.  She is the absence of fear and the freedom to love myself.  She was the figure in my shadow and it was me all along. 

     My insight is to allow yourself to feel every ounce of the ugly, to untie the threads that hold your heart together, let all sanity and stability decompose.  Free the tidy bits of you that have been too compartmentalized, there is no time for pretty pictures, let the oil become watercolor, blend, bleed and disrupt the perfection, sometimes that plan was only ever a mirage.