Twenty Lessons
Twenty things I have learned.
- Mother puts headphones on you so she could have five minutes, for goodness’ sake. You read along. The words become sensible and stop swimming. Soon enough, you share a language.
- Light through stained glass: God's purplish effulgence. You feel Him in-between your ribs.
- On the bus, new school. You keep yourself to yourself, but there's no such thing. He won't leave you alone. It's sport. Sooner or later, it is inevitable. A crackling and a swimming as your nose breaks. You hide the blood under a jumper; you stuff the shirt into the washing machine before mum sees.
- Once your brother is in the grave, you do not believe that he ever existed, except as an idea. You cannot imagine the body underground.
- Daydreaming.
- Putting holy water on your father does not make him come back to you. Mother said it would. It did not work. No matter: faith intact.
- You climb Golgotha and you have an asthma attack. You look for a Veronica to wipe your face.
- Your girlfriend says she loves you, but she wishes you weren't so full of shame. She's right, so you leave her.
- Today's lesson comes in the form of a panic attack. You will not know where you are. Your sense of self will extend only to the edges of the abstract. Feel your body become peripheral.
- You want to die, but not enough. You learn this and you go on.
- When you are out of options, get a degree.
- Keep talking and nobody will be able to tell you how incomplete you are.
- Fall in love with the idea of someone else. Keep the idea in mind and do not look past it.
- Marry the woman you invented. Later, resent her sadness. Let the lines between you unspool.
- Know that, sooner or later, you will have to face yourself.
- Know that, sooner or later, you will not want to.
- Find your counterpoint in the most unexpected of places.
- Watch fifty percent of you breathe her first in a washing of early morning blood. Watch her blacken and be whipped away in a scurrying of white coats.
- Tell her you love everything about her. Feel her breath and know that it is also yours.
- Love: sometimes in gulps. Sometimes in the stutterings between the words. Sometimes in the curling of fingers. Sometimes in a windscreen's frost. Sometimes in a cold bed warmed by snores. Sometimes in nothings that are, somehow, everything. Naming these things is the love act and its pledge.