MY FIRST LOVE KILLED HERSELF
My first love killed herself,
Not in the way you think,
Not with a gun to her head,
Or pills in her dry mouth.
My first love closed herself off to the world,
Her carefree, innocent self became callous and cold,
Afraid of being alone,
But forcing it upon herself.
I haven’t seen my old lover in a long time.
I know she’s still in there,
I see it in small glimpses:
When she’s running free against red turf,
Or watching a silver disc soar,
When she’s in the shower, singing the favorite parts of a song she knows by heart,
Getting soap in her eyes and laughing at the sting of a mistake,
Because she knows it’s a moment to learn,
To close her eyes instead of keeping them open to look at a crowd
She’s conjured up in her iridescent brain.
These moments never stick long.
The grey clouds that stay in the back of her very soul
Pounce like a tiger and claw its way into her green grass heart,
The heart I know as the smell of fresh dew
Or freshly budded flowers,
The heart I know as a hot summer day on the sidewalk,
With a SpongeBob ice pop from the ice cream truck
Dripping down bony adolescent wrists and off her elbow,
As her sisters squabble over who holds the loose change,
Because they always brought two dollars too much.
That heart turns sticky and black like tar,
And smells like dried blood,
The dried blood of a scraped knee no one blew air kisses on to make the burn magically stop,
Like watching once-healthy, vibrant bronze skin wrinkle with age,
And hands calloused with stories of a long past,
Turning grey like ash.
Maybe that’s where it started, and I didn’t catch it,
When her favorite person, bedridden with cancer,
Finally got to speak to the stars instead of at them.
He would tell her about different ones,
As she sat on his knee, saying things like,
“Look, that is my momma. She’s not the brightest, no, but the most colorful.”
She would ask him how he knew it was his mom,
Because there were just too many stars in the sky for him to know each time,
He would look down at her with that gap-toothed smile,
Engraved into a part of her she could never lose,
And simply say, “I just know.”
Or maybe when her mother’s mother woke her up in the middle of a winter night,
To tell her the news that she no longer had what most kids did,
She was lucky to have the moments she did with her very own mother,
Before the hospital said she wouldn’t wake up.
To this day, my lover thinks her mom still had a chance,
Hanging onto that anger of the tiger that claws at her at night when alone again.
Unprovoked, she bites into the nearest thing,
And only lets go when that distant fire
Turns into a roaring beast itself.
My lover will never be the same,
And it’s sad to know that it’s because she believes she’s fine,
Her pride too big for her body,
The pride she gets from her father,
Like the stubbornness she gets from her mother.
Even with me being there every step of the way,
That ice pop dripping down my wrist and that scrape burning on my own knee,
There’s no way I can help her until she learns to let that tiger back into the wild.
Keeping an animal in a cage too small for its growing body is cruel, and she knows it,
But like a leech, she won’t let go.
Maybe it’s because we both know
If she lets go, she’ll have to face the grief of every wrong never righted,
And she thinks she’s not strong enough to ride that wave yet.
My lover killed herself at eight,
When I realized that no one else is going to lick my wounds
And kiss me goodnight when I pushed everyone away
With anger and sorrow I don’t yet understand.
My lover is me,
When I was carefree and naive to emotions as strong as I feel now.
As I say these things out loud, I realize
That at my age I can comfort the child I once was,
To let go of the burdens of what my child self thought was the end of the world,
And look forward at what I have now,
A home with a bed,
A home with a mother who will teach me how to properly care for my scraped knees,
And a dad who will toss me a napkin when my ice cream melts down my wrists
That have filled out with age as he pays with two dollars too extra.
Siblings who will away that animal of anger and black tar
With a stubbornness just as strong as my own.
Though my lover killed herself,
I can honor her memory and let myself grieve for everything she didn’t.
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Featured image credits to Enrique Meseguer on Pixabay
