. . . . .

scars, part one (2003)

when i belch, i finish by exhaling deeply as if ridding my lungs of any remaining gases. i don’t make a big deal of it. it’s just something i do. and every time i belch like that, i think of trish, the first person i ever knew who belched liked that. we only dated two and half months. graduation was enough to end our college romance, but she left the belch with me. there was a time when i could eat campbell’s tomato soup all by itself, but no now, not after kimberly. now a bowl of campbell’s tomato soup just seems… silly without a grilled cheese sandwich to sop it up. i have a scar on the knuckle of my right pointer finger from when i slammed the receiver of the phone so hard after breaking up with sonia it shattered both my phone and my skin......

once a year, every year, just before the academy awards, that old scar prickles, and i’ll send sonia an e-mail asking for her oscar picks. she usually answers. two lives dig their nails into each other for a couple of months, a year, more, and leave curly-cues of flesh in their wake. favourite movies co-opted, catch phrases caught and adopted, books, discarded concert t-shirts for bands you’ve never seen found beneath futons so long ago you’ve forgotten they were once someone else’s. they are blackened rings hidden deep in the hearts of oaks. they are hiroshima shadows on crumbling brick walls. i don’t know what you will have left behind, how you will have marked me: a love for sweet tea and the central texas hill country, sushi and avocados and alt-country and naps and buttermilk pie and the endless pursuit of the perfect plate of migas, . . . . .

a yearning to write from a deeper place, to calm my anger and defensiveness, to quiet my insecurities, to untie the knot deep inside my guts. arguments about traffic about money about jealousy about space about space about space. these scars are water stains on eggshell plaster walls, so faint you can only see them when you wrinkle your nose and squint. they are small half-moon crescents dug into the meat of my heel, whispering of barefoot summers fishing from wooden docks. they are badly-fused broken bones that ache when i read poems about rain. but i want you to know that i have torn my shirt off for you. whip my bare back with rose bushes and nettles, i’ll take the scars, and i cherish every one of them, and i gladly collected them, and the stories behind them, and the lessons learned, and all the songs that for the rest of my life will sing only of you. i’ll take the scars. they’re the only things that prove you have loved, and i have loved you as much as i could.