my well has run dry. there is a mass of wet hair and dirt at the bottom. the drought has lasted a long time; we don't water the lawn anymore.
i am the well and the water. i am the sun and the tinder. i am in need of replenishment but i do not dowse when i should dowse.
my best friends have been dogs, cats, rabbits and rats. what kind of love should i want to receive that is not being held in the palm of one's hand, or given a cushion to lie on?
that period in high school when my mother and i softened to the yard cat and let her in the basement suite. she would curl up in the sun next to the sliding door on the faded, sagging Ikea leather ottoman. When we would tire of her we would pick her up to let her out. (I wonder what she was thinking: how the it stung her, the knife in her calico back, dal segno al fine - back to the first betrayal.) I say "pick her up" like that was something she would let you do. it was more like unsticking a cake from an ungreased pan with your hands - if the cake hissed and swatted.
i think about betrayal. how i learned to make promises without intending to keep them, how i felt that my existence hung on the act of being nice to someone. how i learned from others unsticking me from greying ottomans how to unstick myself, how to betray myself and others, how to welcome someone in and elide in my mind the betrayal i would later enact upon them.
i grew up and realised i no longer could promise and not deliver so i stopped promising so much. but then i realised the vacuum inside my heart that i fill with other people's feelings is a kind of promise, that i am and have always been (and it could be assumed - will always be) a reflection, a little cave to make the echos for their thoughts.
all i want to be is kind but i find myself stuck being nice. although i try not to affirm the things i don't agree with, there is a lot i disagree with, all the time. people are so eager to wrap me in their understanding, i don't correct them when they are wrong. i save them the alienation of misunderstanding me. because i know it hurts to be misread. i take it on the chin.
it becomes this strange game of pong, where we bounce the same notions back from end to end at each other, maybe never even believing in it either of us. i volley not for sport but because if i stop i think i might die.
i soak up all the alienation like a good girl. i will be the one who is misunderstood because i am so good at not needing. i can take it like a man.
i downplay what i believe because i don't want to explain it. defending myself is too exhausting.
i flit from friend to friend, a ghost haunting the ends. i mean different means than what i say. i am projected on the screen of myself. other people want to be comfortable so badly. me too.
(c) 2022 delphi déshabille