if i'm honest

TRIGGER WARNING: DV, please exercise caution.

I think I loved you because I wanted you to kill me.

Not in some melodramatic metaphorical way,

no.

I wanted you to twist me, snap me, break me.

Catapult me into the night sky where no one could ever find my gnarled limbs.

I don’t think it started that way.

At first I wanted pancakes & grilled cheese & warm Diet Coke you clasped too tightly in your fist.

I loved you for your agape, your constellations, your antiquity, your history.

But if I’m honest with myself, 

if I’m honest with you,

& with the rest,

I do remember the first time I felt true fear in your arms,

spread like raspberry preserves on burnt toast just to make it edible,

flattened by your weight onto the green velvet couch…

I saw that shift behind your eyes, 

something twisted, broken, gnarled;

something sinister & starving, 

something I could never overcome or understand.

& as your palm met my cheek, I knew it was repetition.

It was cyclic.

It was centuries of patterns quaking from a root deep inside your testes,

tsunamied out & over my ovaries.

But it had been more than seven years.

& it couldn’t be my repetition because these cells were all infantile & unfamiliar & naive. 

But if I’m honest with myself,

& with you,

& with the rest,

I still knew what a decade could bring.

In just the first year, there was the slap of condescension,

of domination,

belittlement,

that I repeatedly begged not to meet.

In just the first year, there was the strangulation that you were all too comfortable unleashing.

& when my body would fall like bricks,

naked & unconscious from your grip, I’d stir back to life to your sugary call pretending like I hadn’t seen the shift in your eyes in the mirrored reflection just before I’d descended because there was a part of me,

vacant, violent, & worthless,

telling me this is what it was all about,

what my sinews & bones & heartbeats & shouts added up to in the end:

another infuriated mother,

& aching sister,

& betrayed father,

& lost brother,

another shitty reenactment & a lie about how I lit up a room.

because of course I deserved to accept a love like this,

because of course I’d let the insults become isolation, & the lies become a blanket, & the violations become venom,

because of course I’d let the kiss become a kick, & the palm become a fist, & the windpipe become roadkill,

I’d let the rafters fall down, the walls split open, the outlets strike a fire.

I would have rolled in manure, & swallowed lightning, & jumped on top of the S train from the Empire overpass.

I’d let the pillow fights become suffocation, & the spit become poison, & the withholding become war.

I would have let you crack my rib cage, crawl inside my flesh, & ravage my lungs with your canines,

then rip out my heart, stomp on it like a cockroach, & bury it in Prospect Park.

I would have become prey — a carcass, debris.

I wanted to become decay, detritus — free.

I loved you because you’d peel me, reveal me so they’d see:

I’m so easily forgotten,

so pointlessly rotten,

I loved you because I wanted you to kill me.