My lovers come into me. Opening doors where before I built walls. I am a shitty stone mason, everything I try to build crumbles so easily. Because I want to be conquered, I want them to come in. Because I use the same bricks and the same mortar over and over in different configurations and different locations because this is what I am and I can’t change that, but I can keep trying. Because I am not made of stone, I am much too soft, too yielding, too willing to be taken over. I want them build a fire and stay in the warmth with me.
But they don’t.
Sneaking in windows crawling into my heart and body like I am a bed that feels just right.
Not too hard, not too soft.
Eating my words with sugar and milk feeling, full and sated by the honey that pours off my tongue and into them.
Not cold, not hot, but warm and just right.
But then they get scared of the beasts that reside here and they run somewhere they feel safe, with some other girl who has golden locks and a sign that says ‘live love laugh’ over her bed. The one above mine says ‘open’ and I am. She doesn’t know how to live or love or laugh, but she’ll fake it and orgasms to make them feel better, more like conquering men than wounded boys that were too afraid of a challenge.
I feed them.
I lay with them.
But where do I sleep?
What do I eat?
When my body is home to them but I have nowhere to be.
Four empty walls without a roof.
Sleep evading as they thrash in the night or worse, trying to curl my body around the hole they left so I don’t fall in and get swallowed whole. I have fallen before and it is a long climb out.
Gypsy girl with shining, transient trinkets and house plants neglected because I slept over and over and over in broken beds that were never mine.
I carried home in my hips and keys in my purse but they were temporary. Locks can be changed. The way he looks at me has changed.
Everything changes.
I’m changing. Changeling. Condos, cottages on easements, things you can buy but you never really own.
I carry home with me in the bones of my hips, he feels forgiven if he can just get inside. So I let him in even when I don’t want to because I know what it feels like to be locked out of Eden.
I just want to be let back in the house.
‘Home at last’ turns to ‘hope it lasts’ in my ear depending on the day.
My welcome mat says ‘welcome back’ knowing they leave and they will eventually find their way back by my porchlight shining like moths to the moon. I don’t know where the moon is I forgot to look I was too busy looking at him, his face shining in the glow of his cellphone, hypnotized by everything that wasn’t me searching for other places to be other than here.
I have a toothbrush in my purse, a backpack in my car in case I get asked to stay or forced to leave. Doesn’t make a difference I know I can live just fine outside in my truck under a bridge. I think that is why I always favored trucks over cars, you can fit more, stretch out between bags and boxes in the back, carve out a tiny place to sleep with your back pressed against a box of photographs my mother gave me that I can’t leave behind. Childhood memories of the last of the houses I felt home in.
Once my apartment caught fire when I was sleeping and I didn’t want to get up and leave I just wanted to stay in bed for 5 more minutes thought the smoke alarm was a clock and I could negotiate my way into staying. My 12th house in my 20th year. It wasn’t mine but I had a key. I had a baby in my belly, where he called home for over 9 months and I kept him safe in there.
That is all I am, somewhere to stay safe while a fire rages before they go out into the world and assess the damages out there not minding what has been done to me and I am left to pick up the same clothes off the same floor staring at the hole in the door trying to figure out how to patch this one this time.
“Everyone’s chest
is a living room wall
with awkwardly placed photographs
hiding fist-shaped holes.”
Andrea Gibson
Time to burn it all to the ground and move again.
Gypsy girl in search of a home.
“home is a thing you hold in your head, what’s believed is real, what’s gone is dead”- some book I read a million years ago.
No matter what people tell me, I always measure myself against what I know of me.
Some people (✔) constantly ignore what they know of themselves because they need someone else to do the measurements.
Gypsy or not, home or lost, whole or fragments on the floor, we all live our whole lives. From beginning to end, and no amount of regret or self-doubt or retrograde-inspired turmoil will ever be more powerful than the truth of the Mother, the gift of the Lover, the mystery of the Other.
Open, Welcome Back, these are signs of generosity and no matter how you focus on the negative that creates the photo, the proof is in the light… Would you take control more, and deny the needy hearts?
Would you change, if you could?
Home is a memory that you make every day.
Nobody can break it or take it away.
i think i decided i’ll be home when they put me in the ground. then i get to rest. life is for the living and if i have to do it in constant flux and out of the back of a caravan, so be it.
Whatever you decide, wherever you temporarily plant yourself, just remember that you have been and continue to be a lighthouse for a few people.
Keep shining, please, the waters grow treacherous.
However you show up, whatever you hide or reveal, remember that you have opened eyes, you have cleared cobwebs from secret doors and you have made life bearable for some. Keep being you, please.
If ever you stumble, or fall to your knees defeated and desperate, remember that your voice is a soothing, healing song of hope for some. Please keep speaking.
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