luck is a word you can learn
shame is one you forget
The skies haven’t been clear since you’d arrived, but these days they’re just dirty. You feel the smoke on your skin, sifting in from Canada and throughout this city you think you might love. Sweat trickles down your chest, the nape of your neck, the undersides of your wrist: SSRI’s most loved side effect. The sky is crying, and so is your body. And your heart — your heart is beating like it could fly out past your ribcage. This anxiety always comes out of nowhere. There is something terrible coming, you’re sure of it.
Well, you’re not sure of it. You’re not sure of anything. What you know — and you know this well — is that that this feeling of doom is only because your body doesn’t understand how to process the symptoms of happiness; because you were born upside-down and certain you have a debt to pay off through turmoil, through suffering. Happiness is a meal you’re forced to eat plates of — and you do like a starving child — only to throw it all up in the bathroom. You take good things and ruin them. This is the way your hands learned to be. You grab and clutch and wail, like the wind.
My, you forget yourself. That there is no one else. Just you and yourself and sometimes a handful of people you love. Did you think yourself better than all the papers, all the science, all the philosophers telling you the secret to life is stable selfishness? No, you thought yourself smaller until you were nothing, Pluto twinkling light years away. Fading as the universe stretches like your favorite linen tightening against the mattress. Don’t say you didn’t know. Don’t say you didn’t know this greed — no, you used it, just dressed it up as altruism. When will your mouth learn the sounds no can make?
Canada is burning six hours away. You are walking through the streets in your favorite shirt, air wet against your skin. There was an iron that slid against the wrinkles of your life, this time. The heat of it didn’t hurt, it crossed like a kiss from a hot mouth. They say a forest fire can’t be put out, only watched. Looked at from a distance. They say a forest fire is a natural disaster; a moment of impact, the boom of lightning and thunder, then fire that catches, and catches, and catches —
Rain. Cleansing. Water like a river under your feet. Forgiveness. Scars are only reminders of love you’d endured. Memories like movie scenes that make you sob with laughter. You’ve learned to love these people even when they’re wrong. There will be ash left. But plants can still grow from ash. There are vines forcing themselves through the concrete by the entrance of the house, you know that much.