Ellipsis - 20151213

There is a barb inside, like an opened safety pin lodged in lungs that I feel on occasion when I breathe a certain way.  There is a drop of blood on the metal needle of the appliance congealed with an encrusted mathematic.  Ribs elongating, tilting the abdomen to stretch back into why I have made certain decisions or felt or perceived other human beings in the manner I did.

I think of your masks, how long you must have practiced wearing them, how I reacted, the haughtiness in my assumptions of witnessing this layered painting coating your inner canvas foundational in oils and emulsions of color, sensing the coats vibrating, pulsing as in ideas of novelty, intimacy, or fear.  It was all so atomic, quantum scale universe type of beads to observe, that daring sort of blasphemous naked.  

That breathing process got complicated in digesting that mask.  You probably show so many a mask allowing them to see what they want to see.  Holding still, against a wall, they do all the magic to spin lipstick into austere-pensive or stage-bombastic.  The illusionist suffers the illusion.  Maybe I had a bigger imagination as a poet or a broken-hearted romantic peering for Shakespeare in a digital theater generation.  I got cold mirrors wiped of shower steam reflecting an empath and a narcissist.  Pondering why I would fall so hard, the clunky teeth and lockjaw.  The nail through the foot of it all. 

I thought about why I wanted your empathy and forgiveness so badly, to explain, realizing how terrible you and the safety pin were for my health.  I realized the indestructibility, the permanence of wanting you to understand, to know, to drink this went way back.  That pull in me was fetal-like, basic human origin story concoction-type of cocktail lubricated in the umbilical.  I couldn’t figure out how you cracked me acorn-like, reactionary not-so-much requested, but a genesis-spark in the ruination of that mask in such a basic impetus dynamic of how one intakes being around another person, breathing, enlivening poetry.  The broken, the egg-like, fissure-shell, and mess-yolk whisked catalyst inspiration from a woman afraid of any punctuation mark besides an ellipsis.

You were a professional mask-wearer, you told me.  You warned me about emotional nihilism.  You saw all the other skulls against the rocks and how you liked and didn’t like to see them thrash the jagged.  The visual and auditory space kept between whomever you actually are and this impression the sailors invent in our heads.  Such a foolish game. 

I know why I did it now; that barbed romantic, writing incessant, the skullduggery of impostor investigative voyeuristic journalism, the embarrassment and the we-all-fuck-up garbage pail.  I know why I did that with you, why you got to me.  Thank you.  I just want to say thank you for those masks and what those rocks taught me.  I don’t blame you.  You have your own journey, but in mine I may always remember you as the woman who helped me see my own mask, who helped me look my fears dead-to-rights dive into a pool of writing and self-examination however queer, degrading, or raw to let go of and grab hold of exactly what I needed.  I am sorry and I thank you.