Dana Miller

Spinningfields: Part One

(The Place Where the Daddies Dissolve)

Making predictions in joules about the mass of any man’s heart will get your own killed stone dead, especially if you are a Sibyl (not a Spragg) born in a Piscean prayer hall. See, this is how people like you stay married, and also the thing that makes it certifiably amazing that you are proud of that. You claim that you “talk through“ things, but really, you just argle-bargle apologize for your rote actions and move on before either of you is confronted with the stark recognition that you have both become Dickensian meat porters for the other’s atomized ambitions (and you’ve both got the figures to show for it too). Family is everything. Yeah right. That old saw you use to saw your own legs off the moment you realize you never had any to stand on when it came to the likes of me. None of you uxorious unguents are properly handfasted, by any definition. What you playground-define as conjugal loyalty is nothing but provincial presenteeism, but nuance was never your thing, we do know and acknowledge. “Marriage,” for you, is just rightsizing your deformed-by-conjoinment perspectives until you get legibly homonymous and rootbound to the point of suburban respectability. Then, it’s the official shuffle-off to Sex Twice A Week At Best Land and “date night” culture that is too douche-doused to even warrant the name.

Meanwhile, I expect the protective instinct of even my least-close friends to be nothing less than lethal, for this is what you will get from me from the first day that I name you as such. You won’t get away with any of that solipsistic echo-chamber errata here, and even though I warned you and so did my entire redoubtable being, you just had to go and find that out the hard way, didn’t you? I do not bend to your biological cascades, and lordy but you are unnerved by this cybercrime of my cervix’s mind but you cannot say so because even your rock t-shirts are subconscious (like your paternalism). In my world, we excavate the wound, because, regrettably for the tranche treaties you call trysts, it is not the successful execution of the piteous pragmatics in everyday grocery life that forms the fundamental foundation of feelings with a person of my caliber in this place. It is the passions, and not just any in general either–the ones dining on the choral comestibles of that Higher Love language. The sublime, not the saudade is due here, sir. You will not make me the deuteragonist in your autoschediastic Sad Dad tale, and our connection will be forged on the ethereal power of unified spirit, always, not requisitioned time bonds, ticked boxes, and homegrown handcuffs that we oozingly co-refer to as the hamantash of our homebody hearts. Keep the frugal shortcuts you call connections for those that are as emotionally entropic as you. We do concinnity on this side of the talon, baby, not codependency decorated with the paper years that the rest of the world will classify as concrete evidence.

John Wick says a man must have something to live, die, or kill for. John Wick is right, and I would add that, if you hope to ever exit the matrix, you need to get wicked honest about what those things are, not what you think you are supposed to say that they are whenever such exigent enquiries come up for sale in the estaminet of your daily commute to nowhere. Meanwhile, see if you can work out whether this one is a knout or a knockabout rose, ready? If your hematophagous marriages are even half as replete and fulfilling as your toxic positivity crutch has trained you to tirelessly parrot in public, how come all of you have to be told-by-wife-tears to stop talking to me? What a thing to have a life built on societal structures so structurally unsound, arbitrary, and fire-free that a friend demolishes them by being just that, a friend. Every single time, it is never until the shame influence of a bonded female in your life intervenes that you even feel a moment's worth of guilt for what you should never have to feel guilty over. Do you want to know why? It is because the sacred feminine is the most powerful natural force on the planet, and most of you never had any direct interaction with it even when you were single, all those dinosaur years ago. Once you have not been single for a long time? Oh, honey. Your mind doesn’t even know what it doesn’t know, but your body sure never forgets. And I never stop smirking at how you all fall down on the fairground of finding this out.

This curl in my nose is so much more than judgment. Don’t diminish my righteous ridicule of your entire almost-existence down to internet slang, dear wastrel. I want every cell of what remains of your man parts to do what passes for rocking up in your ossified “making time” world (and what I just call quasi-twitching) within the understanding that it is the lulu of all ginchy dismissal when I say: You are mere broken-down Fantoccini for we Feral (and some of you are just smart enough to know it). You can’t be taken seriously, and neither can most of your piffling partners. You said yourself that marriage was never important to you; it’s just something you did to secure the assets to the right people when you kick off. The poison-perspective I get on all of you common males (for you could never be justly called ‘men’ by anyone) is connected to what I am, and what I am draws out of you something that your next closest confidantes, wives, kids, secret lovers, and even your fellow LUFC buttplug-buddies do not ever catch a glimpse of. Tell me, do they salt the currywurst with burdock up there in Ladsville? Funny how you can tell the truth about so many unspeakable things when you are pushing up on mortality salience next to me, but the moment The Mommy Diary is back over your shoulder, suddenly you’re all Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. Return to your sexual slacker anthem and your duumvirate of doom. This is what my next book needs to be about, if I can only stop wasting my time sobbing over the striations you inevitably leave on my soul every time I allow myself to believe aloud that you could be so much more. I lack the ability to lean on feeble aphorisms to save my ass like you do. Such panaceas only work for the penised, I notice.

I do find it loosely amusing (in the way of Candyland) to watch the Pirandellian gerent-wives, those domesticated grifter-princesses who lap your limp love out of terrier bowls you call dinner, drunk on their ultimatum mom-tails, call my heightened emotional timbre and wolf nose “unsavory” rather than admit it beat right out of their supposedly loyal partners what their right hands never once did on those ever-present headache nights. Right? Preach. They all say, “I’m really not that kind of woman,” right after they’ve gone through your digital devices, become heart-sore at what they already knew, and told you exactly what to do once again (just like always). I give only silent monologues in those moments because it’s much more educational to watch them react to standing across from a woman who truly isn’t any of those classically clingy things, a woman who, in their same circumstances, would tell you to go and help you do it. What your marriage has taught you long ago was to mistake the jerk of the yanked chain around your neck for a cheeky tug of the real sort. Didn’t stop you at bath time every day from knowing what the real Yanks could do at both ends of your spankbank though, did it? Ouch and splash. Let any one of your kind get but a whiff of the gladiatorial gamine in that crumbling dreamscape where you decant your diluted domesticity and you are instantly in my place–a place in which time decay and implied volatility are not proportionate, and where antipoems might be written in Daedalian blood, your hokey hopes nothing more than the haptic taradiddles of the quickly beheaded. When I was as green and unquestioning as you, I was  married too, though never your way. We set out to remake the template and, to a large extent, we did. Anyone who knew us then would have told you that we were a couple with no prototype.

However, what everyone should be telling any woman thinking of marrying, and what I eventually came to respect, is that the whole institution, no matter how you set the board, is set up to devour you, and whether or not you enjoy the feeling of being consumed, none of this is ever in the best interest of your fullest future. Nothing designed by patriarchs ever is best for women. And guaranteed, your husbands will end up talking to lupercalian women like me about all the things they have no space to talk to you about inside your confines, er, consummations. Things like that they would not have those kids if they had it all to do over again because hot damn did they cost you a life like you’re lusting after over here. Now see, in my marriage, conversations like that were mandatory and preemptive. The only married couples I respect are the ones that have the guts to live out the fact that there are a lot more than two people in any marriage worth having, and the ones that are likewise able to fully acknowledge when the relationship has gone from centripetal to centrifugal force and end it.

Beware these Venusian vaginas that will favor holding moon-charged jade eggs rather than becoming the hot-dog-down-a-hallway vortices for your utterly unnecessary children. Ours is a quiver of quodlibets, not a faux-quivering thigh, and you will have to learn to speak that neoteric jaguar language or take a full knee to the unmaking power of real desire. Do not joke with my kind about things that could never be true—our ravelin-hearts won’t get it and your heart will get the Juliet dagger the day we find you out for the Taker that you absolutely are, no matter what the village idiots who are just as doughy as you may tell you down the pub. I disgust myself weekly with the worlds of ways that I still quietly wait for you to make good on our roads under the sea. If you’re lost, you can look and you will find me…time after time.

I think the largest part of what you have learned over here is that your nugacity is not a neutral territory like your sedated, repetitious life has led you to believe for the past forty years. You never made the growth transition from reactivity to responsiveness, and that is a truly embarrassing fact given your age. You have been rewarded in big and small ways for being painfully, avoidably ordinary by men just like yourself and you have made the self-soothing mistake of believing that this makes you different. What’s funny is that you dare call yourself a pacifist and labor so laughably under the socialist’s banner-belief in mythical equality, but you started a war over here with greater ease than any of the proud capitalist murderers you claim to despise, and then had the gall to openly despise me in real time not just because I could dodge your RPGs, but because I could drop the A-bomb on your boyo battle ground and stay standing up inside the mushroom cloud too. Just like an American, you bet.

The big, hard truth is that I will have something bigger than your rationed lower-case romanticism, and you will not tell me, as you have done your local woman, that small things like looking after your children are the same as big things I can do by and for myself. They are not, and you are the worst kind of liar–one that doesn’t even realize that your whole life is the lie. You may well treat me and the size of my sacralized love like a gypsy curse, but your conciliatory caricatures of care are the essence of my chagrin, and they are that other woman’s Chablis, so best stick to where and what you belong in future. One day the truth will come and bash your brazenness right out of your head with a boulder built of your own kenosis, and I hope I am behind the nearest willow tree to watch.

The substance of my assassination was to be softer, however. It kept coming in little microbirths menacing their way out of your mouth all the way down to the day that you were seen performatively working the bar of the place that tore us apart, thereby doubling down on your worst choice yet in a lifetime built entirely on willful wrong choices and nebulous non-selections. That was the day you sent all the compensatory damage you had incurred and failed to pay into nuclear flames, putting gochujang to the gore. Here’s something else you should learn: there are things to wear about your home and things to burn. I made it rhyme for you in hopes it would help you to remember (in deference to your noted problems with memory wherever memory costs you). You could have been Kings of Leon, you know. Those are the most southern boys I have ever seen and yet they have nothing of The South in them. You can climb out of your stultifying culture and be what you were meant to be. Figure it out. I should have known from that first conversation about tea in the microwave. You said “well, it’s just what you’re used to, isn’t it.” No, dear insular one, I thought. The point is and was that you should not be used to things like that; you should be used to everything. Open your mind beyond the narrow couch cushion of your experience. Even the tea is better out here!

Though it was very, very clear quite early on that medium-mope was as hard as you had ever rocked, not just because you need permission for pure joy and big toys where you come from but because you have so little to actually say, you terrified me daily with what you did not know about free and undomesticated women, nor regarding the profound sensitivities of the voyager breed as a whole. It came out in the wash that you had not been around any authentically cool people in the Nineties and didn’t know why it is regarded as “The Last Good Time.” You held no lived appreciation for a controlled mess of a person and could not comprehend the difference between something that has cultural relevance to a place as opposed to the much bigger and more important somethings that hold cultural relevance to a time. Wittgenstein said, “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent,” but what did you know even of Wittgenstein lest you came by that learning through me? The only thing worse than a poorly read man is a man who is convinced he’s better read than his nearest peers, and it was not my job to pungle for your bungled education. My disgust at the way you tried to fashion what you do not know into a wing-clipping mechanism for wild women such as myself puts me in mind of something shouted in fury by one of my greatest fey film inspirations, Una from Legend. “What care I for human hearts? Soft and spiritless as porridge. A faerie’s heart beats fierce and free!”

To be fair, I rule the words and so they don’t tend to go out of their way to help us much when you and I set out to make the most of the moon. No amount of springtime strawberry picking or Renaissance festivals were ever going to save us from Zorba’s full catastrophe because, unbeknownst to me, you were begrudging me all my power to be Behenian stars while you waged some supernatural skirmish with your own apotheosis at the same time. There I was thinking we were so close and connected. There I was believing in you harder than I ever had anyone. I know now that you never got it. Things like the fact that the donkey in The Banshees of Inisherin was inverted holy host symbolism. The donkey being Christ’s signature animal, cross on its back and all, and the finger of man is what he ingests and dies from, much like so much of Christian Ireland on both sides of the Catholic/Protestant divide have senselessly lost their lives for communion with religion. But I don’t fear the pervy priests or any part of the IRA as much as I feared you from the first time it became clear that you thought you were such a good guy. Those are always the worst guys, and you lived up to that widely known reputation and then some. No lie was too manipulative or depraved for you not to tell it ten times to my upturned face, was it? Even there you were only in keeping with your home’s established norms! Negate the woman, nullify the evidence. Let it be known: the worst things that have ever been said to me in my life, the most cold-blooded and heart-hobbling phrases, have not come from the well-advertised brute squad. Rather they have fallen like simian venom from the lips of two separate-but-completely-the-same Yorkshiremen who were absolutely convinced that they were “lovely” people. Just ask around to all their “casual” and “occasional” acquaintances who do not really know them at all, you’ll see! Male ego-painted myopia: the Monaco black diamond of monsters.

Mab, but they do see themselves as devoted daddies all the while, don’t they? Whereas I see them far more clearly, albeit through a crystal vision, and miles outside the warped ‘family values’ funhouse mirrors in which their only meager self-reflection takes place. I see them as the lowly sexual grifters they biologically are, the same genetic reality that got them married in the first place (secure that lazy lay, for it could well be your last!)---and they always, always prove me right by the end. This particular one had been my personal pop guard, the first thing my voice hit whenever it was going to exit my soul in the form of a song, the thing that kept me from recording static. If I couldn’t have told him something, I did not want to tell anyone. Nothing was real or worth knowing until he knew about it. I had a helicopter with running chainsaws for propellers in my belly the day I was forced into the full realization that he was not a Goonie. He had never had friends like mine, or me, knew nothing of shared adventures that you tell only one person about. As such, he did not even know the hero’s language, much less how to confront that inner lack to a degree that would keep him from telling the parkour-like partial-truths of the damaged and oblivious, which is all he really was.

This is not a man to rely on if your life needs saving. If it is up to him, I hope your name is Inigo Montoya and you are prepared to die, because the only way he is rescuing you from anything is if the derring-do requires him to feel sorry for someone or something that designed its own demise. He is all about that: cheering on people who should be slapped in the face and ignoring the only stars in the sky. That includes himself, on both counts. This life is happening at the speed of light, and yet he made all his travels, whether word or deed, like a narcoleptic snail on Xanax. I had the urge to shake him and say: you don’t get any awards for getting less than you wanted, and you definitely don’t get any OBE’s for learning to say (and even surface-believe) that you wanted less than it is clear you do. As a woman, I must say that it is incomprehensible to me how anybody sleeps with a coward like that. For my part, lionhearted courage is the only foreplay. I wouldn’t even allow a man who was that shy of himself into my ZIP Code, much less into my G zone. Look around though and you will find that the tiresome task of gratifying men like that over the long term largely falls to women who never cared much for fucking in the first place. Like I said before: your marriage is nothing more than agreed-upon maritime fraud committed in a shared boat with a big mortgage you cannot afford. I would tell you to go to Hell for how you taxed me for that, but you already live there and seem far too pleased with the lack of heat in your address as it is, so I will just leave you where you lie (so dog-like) against your own deceptions, and you can suck my scorpling scales until the tipple cones in your micro mind topple right over under the weight of it all, just like I did the day you nonchalantly vivisected my vim once and for all.

Men like this are always so sure that they are right without having done any homework whatsoever. They run from facts that debunk their self-mythologies rather than letting the abraded truth transform them like it is built to do for all of us. They do not understand that you have no chance of being right about anything, not even the smallest parts of your life, until you have French-kissed every fanged fact that would tear your throat out, but most especially the ones you want so badly to say are just “conclusions” because actually grappling with their 360-degree dynamism makes for immediate ends to shabby half-marriages and quite a lot more. Rather than squaring off with the sham supporting the undercarriage of their unseemly unions, they millennial-ghost the person who made them lock eyes with the actual ghost of their marital fables. It is an old and boring story. Living like some half-hearted pair of human psammophiles would not be such a bad thing if you were doing so in the process of turning yourself into a decadent sheik, a Black stallion, or an Arab Strap, but in your case the aridity only connotes how soul-suckingly dry everything in your life is (especially that thing you don’t talk to your coffee shop ‘friends’ about, gasp!), and, ironically, it points louder than anything else to your infinite lack of sand.

Capability is the only cool. You’re not right about something just because you live at right angles and didn’t know what to do when you met an ouroboros. You are not to be commended for transmuting your teenage mistakes into some kind of spoken-word peasant mythology that you now use to measure out the rest of the days of your life. How well you can perfect your acceptance of your paltry paradigm’s manifold, totally reversible imperfections is not an honorary daddy-designator. You expect applause for this because your neighbors are polishing the same shoddy sequence and your need for belonging debased your balls before you ever really got to use them for what they are actually for. It really is tough shit, as you will only ever get middle fingers from me for all of this, and that would’ve been true even had you not window-shopped your “humanist” heart out over here on the other side of the integrity street.

People like you are living in a different day and time than the ones like me who are left behind. It is crucial not to let the sky or the bending light trick you into thinking otherwise if you are one of my kind. Their sky is not your sky. The false sun of faithlessness lights their unrecognized Hades whilst yours remains under the pitch-noon of the pre-dawn, and their earth stays put because they don’t recognize risible stagnancy quakes even as they spend their lives straddling fetid faultlines. Realizing at the end that I had only ever been some sordid simulation to you, like a D-grade Black Mirror ripoff you kept playing over and over in the darkest corner of your mind, hit like crusted-spoon heroin. I do have to say that I have never seen a person as dishonest as you try so very diligently to pass yourself off as the opposite. Most people who are deceptive at your hollow volume are very honest about it. You even lied about your own lies right up to the very end, and could not so much as give me the gift of the truth about where and when you had not told the truth, even when pointblank asked as part of the ceremony of leaving.

My dog can smell leaving on me hours before I set off to go somewhere, like I can smell it on you even as you win Oscars for your performative pretending that you would never. Have you ever watched someone else’s drunken optimism about a situation you’ve already lived through and seen every side of but they haven’t yet? And they are seeing wistful opportunities through the same parti-colored glasses you once wore but had torn off your face by lived experience in that same scenario? But you can never tell them that none of what they are seeing is really there because there just wouldn’t even be a way to broach the scope of what you’d want and need to say to warn them. Looking back on the woman inside me who listened so raptly to your falsities every day is like that. I feel sorry for the me that you killed. She didn’t know any better and she loved you so intensely, innocently, and with such irrepressible iridescence in her eyes.

Very recently, just to survive another of your vanished afternoons and the neverending cortisol spiral, I had to resort to re-watching Leaving Las Vegas because of all that it makes me remember to covet. Not that I have ever spent a day of my life failing to, but something about being so close to your Townhome, tumbledown, tepid way of ‘loving’ scooped me out like an avocado. My life has always been a Harley Weir photoworld with a Lemuria filter so I could not imagine less for someone as beautiful as you. You said I couldn’t know, but you didn’t realize you’d already said it in words, in body language, even in spaces. Good grief, there are two need-riddled kids next door and a dependent in-law downstairs. Hogtied by children’s schedules (and how many trips to the Concord again?), it’s not like you guys are (or have ever been) screw-swinging from the rafters or able to have any sizable spontaneity in that matter at all. Your whole life takes place on a preset grid, and uptight bedroom sex with one person all your life is just one casualty of that second-rate setup. No wonder you cower so.

All grand beauties withhold their deepest secrets, but I never had any and I still wonder if that is why men I’ve loved this much only wanted to use me for transactional currency. There exists a common thread in the men who get close to me. They start to feel held hostage by my commitment to our shared joys in some way that they never express but will later expect me to foot the emotional bill for. They come for their manic pixie wet dreams, the party, the circus, the colors. When they realize that all of those same attractions ray out from a fathomless (and thus un-possessable and thus difficult) well of good memories, real happiness based on real freedom, unbreakable self-confidence, and strength of will, they start to resent the very same innocence and generosity of spirit that drew them to me in the first place. Then they do the worst part: they find some way to blame me for how they feel about not being able to say any of this, not being able to keep up, and not being from the same planet. Some get dangerously quiet. Some get violent. Some just disappear. None do anything right. All are primadonnas, and all fear what the paracme of me makes them feel. The experience of their wilting and retreating feels very like the prized SunJun sandals that I had in my 1980s childhood that carried me everywhere, and that I finally found a replacement pair at a vintage shop, convinced to the gills that I just bought back a piece of my past. Yet, it only took one summer for the strap to break and the sole to come apart because me and the SunJun simplicity have walked far too many miles without one another in the intervening years for foot and leather to fit functionally anymore. These men break their own strap, and one they fitted round my Cinderellian ankle, and buckled with what anyone would believe was the purest level of committed care. Here’s the devil’s own deal that no one dares mention ‘til you’re nearly dead: if you have to punch a time card with your misnamed ‘family,’ you have already failed at the meaning of ever prioritizing one, with or without the scare quotes. If you have the right kind of friends (which only comes when you have done the right kind of work on yourself and submitted to the right kind of honesty–the excoriating kind), there is not one jot of separation between your wish, your wife, your wonder, or your whimsical side. I know how atheistic you think you are, so here’s a Bible verse that explains my part in all this for you, and perhaps one day you will taste the unMary in it: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.”--Job 13:15.

The way you always tried to oversimplify things was the part where it amazed me most that you could not see how religious you are. Dogmatic people always try to strip things back to a few bent perceptions. They never address far-reaching truths or laser-like inquiries, and they never engage anything that is going to upset their pre-established belief system. You are exactly like the Baptist debutantes with anything that challenges your fake equilibrium, which is the most comical part of you thinking that you are so “scientific,” and also the reason I cackled like a hyena the day you said I had a “theological mind” just after I’d hit you with roughly 10 scientific facts you could not refute. Your id is your only god, my friend, and god knows you are a card-carrying cult member when it comes to that. I see clearly now that the actual reason you always tried to dumb things down to such an excruciatingly elementary, empty, and obvious place was so that you could get them on your level and try to grab back some of your favorite thing: control (of which you never had any with me). I wish I could still feel sorry for you for flailings like that but I’ve been short on sorry for your atrophied trash-breed for quite some time. All that while I was lionizing your soul, you were wetter than a haddock’s bathing costume and I was six months away from finding that out back when I used to try to debate with you like you knew what debate was.

You should not need a peacock’s plumage announcing, to yourself more than anybody, that you are someone’s husband or Dad. You should get cool enough to realize that neither of those things are your identity and the people that matter most in your life are going to look at those last in their estimations of you. Wake up, dear pretender Pretenders boys! Patrilineal mindsets are about a lot more than who cooks dinner and answers the door. Until you grasp and embrace what power dynamics actually mean between the sexes, especially in any scenario where a couple are cohabitating, you are nothing more than bootblacks in the smithery of ingrained sexism. By contrast, and perhaps ironically, it is the older guard that will call me a ‘warrior’ where you only saw your unstated dream. I have been named versions of ‘warrior’ by several men over fifty-five that I positively worship but that contemporary society would swiftly glaze with the wrong male gaze. You act like there’s not a way to keep yourself free, like your mistakes are matters of perception or personal opinion when the reality is that they were just epic failures of the id that you have not copped to yet. You don’t want to do the work—and as a result your much-advertised empathy is nothing but embolalia.

You were used to the plumpest kind of plunder and suddenly you were dealing with a renowned conduit, a centurion transmitter, a cipher, a djinn. Your job was simple as street sweepers: Love the fervor of my mind, adore my anger to distraction, live in the willful enslavement of even my shadow self. Salute totalitarian entanglement every single day like you should, like its station requires. Some might even call it quantum enjambment, but that’s a story for another place (and a man with but one face). You recuse yourself from the responsibility for all of this by falling back on “this is how I am,” but the truth is this is what you have chosen to be because you are too lethargic and afraid to change for the better. You were all about having your own category when you got your birthday message. Suddenly it was only me loving that loud once it was time to love on the public stage. You are too scared of what your live-in mother-in-law will say, the social stigma that will come with it all in such a small town as you live in, and the blood it will draw in places where you have come to sketch out your infirm character. You didn’t know it was chalk, not Sharpie, until I got there, did you? Nor that you had been drawing with your non-dominant hand all your life. These revelations should have been received like the aurelian manna that they were, but instead you just made me the villainess of the villanelle for daring to speak them aloud.

 Incidentally, this is the same fear that caused you never to weigh your own options back when all of yours were still wide open. You never thought enough of yourself to grant yourself the future that was purpose-built by Mother Nature for you and, ultimately, you are mad at me when I do that on your behalf. Rather than seeing it as the compliment it very much is when someone names out your potential for the world to hear, you want me to play along with your ritualized ruse because everyone else does, failing to bear in mind that what you will love about me until the end of time is that I am not and will never be everyone else. There is a biological greed in-built to your selected lifestyle of soccer and Soma, though you are as deaf to that as you were to my rightful place with you. I make you want something you cannot admit to, like “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” by Lenny Kravitz. Like all sports cars worth owning, I am built for speed not for comfort, sweetheart. A woman equally interested in flowers and Formula One is a fey creature you find yourself fulsomely ill-equipped to fight or fuck in the only ways made known to you via your weekly ridgeling rendezvous with your settled-for top flops. For those of us who get all Billy Idol with it every minute of every day, your torpor is your ticket right back to the sofa. Carom.

I had no chance, from the jump. You seem utterly clueless as to how low your general quality of life is and get mortally offended anytime the top of its head brushes the soles of someone else’s shoes. Where you are from, insisting on doing well at the highest levels is frowned upon, especially as real success always requires leaving your stunted area in order to take place. You spend all of your precious human life just barely surviving and then have the audacity to act like you think other people are supposed to see your chosen hardships as being noble or somehow salt-of-the-earth commendable. In reality, they are just ignorant choices that you did not have to make and do not have to continue making, but gracious aren’t I a right bitch for pointing that incontrovertible fact out. You react to any advancing savior element like it’s a wasp sting. It’s a real trick when your government is the reason that you don’t have anything, and the machine has trained you so well to say that you don’t want anything that you can’t even notice that indoctrination without the same garish outside help that first ‘put a pin in the balloon’ of your northern nonsense. There were things I wanted you to see on my face that you could not have read had I spelled them out in running blood. Things like how the shopping centers where I spend my days with my Mom are all run-down in the most wonderful, nostalgic, breathtaking ways. Things like that I take night drives to nowhere, blasting the songs I hope to sing one day with all of what I thought were our shared heroes. I tell no one when I’m going; I tell no one when I’m back, but I would have told you everything about all of it. Things like the pocket-sized dog, the three female deer, and the busiest little rabbit that ran across my path the last time I took one of those starlit drives, the omen trilogy-inside-a-trilogy of the century. What kills me is that it wasn’t even that your words didn’t mean anything, it is what they could have meant. Like the oldest surviving shop in Cheapside, they could be an armorer, a silversmith, or an optician. It was all just down to the time. The edges of your broken clocks have left knurls all over me.

The gall of you pretending to be an Alanis Morisette fan, Mr. Duplicity. You are the nubilous fuckwit she wrote that whole album in protest against, you know. Of course you don’t. In the Oxford evolution debate of 1860, you are the whiny Wilberforce, pantaloons atwist at being fairly beaten and unable to accept it, and I am the arch-eyebrowed Huxley all damn day, unapologetically preferring any monkey ancestor to every part of your occlusion of obvious reality. It’s a bit like your deranged dance with biohacking (the first of many flagrant signs of your situation that I ignored because of how much I adored you) and the sick giggle I get every time I remember you saying that you read up on Quantum Physics like me. If only. You are the equivalent of a philosophical lamprey, clamping onto ideas and movements as they pass by your cozy “good man” armchair, never actively involved in any real thinking or doing, and always sucking blood that doesn’t belong to you in the process. Even your ridiculousness is rank and file.

No woman is beholden to your plebeian assumptions, least of all me. The pathetic excuses that you make for yourself are for you alone to waste the next 20 years of your life dying beneath, not for me to even elevate via acknowledgement. I will simply kick them to the celestial curb at the same time and place wherein I boot you in the literary face with everything you failed to feel at the appropriate dB when you still had the chance to be honest, good, and even great. The saddest thing about you is that you cannot even conceive of a world where people care as much as I do, and yet you dared to equate any of your daily sippet snippets to the Gaza-like gash of the gamma rage I spoke fluently years before you broke my chest. You best believe that the Lycos in my lilt will smear that alloy all the way across your avaricious Cadillac high before it is all said and done, and you will remember me, Swiss cheese recollection or no. That separation I made in your head? I own it outright, deed and all, forever, and you will feel me whether you recognize what the burn under your tongue is every time you hear Tame Impala or not. You haven’t done enough drugs to know which body rushes mean something, so just pretend the big bumps it makes on your prudey parkrun days is me on top of the washer with nothing but my glitter on again, okay? I’m not so disdainful of you yet that I don’t want you to enjoy your total despair.

Here’s one for my favorite wobbly wicket keeper: as the field of Physics formally recognizes the proven tendency of the universe to move from low entropy to high entropy of its own volition wherever no interference is given, why, dear “humanist,” would you believe our sorry species was the lone exception to this established natural law? Ah yes, that’s right, because you play as though you can invent and rewrite your values as you go along and still be a respectable man by the definitions set forth by your cultural captors. All this while you claim to be a factualist debate king with a big reputation in your tiny, triangular town, yet you do not even know how to engage a thought you have not pre-lit with the prim little penis-shaped prams that circled their wagons round what little analytic ability you were born with donkey’s years ago. I have stood by and watched you do everything but openly snicker at the idea of a moon cycle, but suddenly connected activities such as sound baths were vetted, reliable, and even praiseworthy the moment they were found to be systematically soothing to an autistic child in the household. Any homeopathic or non-Western elements that did not directly impact your own skinny life experience adamantly required a double-blind experiment or ten in order to become valid science in your orthogonal dialectic, but the ones that offered a direct and measurable daily benefit to someone you actually gave a damn about somehow magically did not.

These clearly drawn political lines (which are transparently linked to class) around what I would just call proper, informed living are as arbitrary and selective as your mutism and morals, and they had a big message in them for me too that I completely missed. The fact that a salt session with a Goop gal would raise your hidden-hesitation eyebrows hints at what was demonstrably obvious way before I had to wade through your saturnine seances with slippery slope logic: people like you (read: those with anschauung in absentia) are motivated more by self-interest than by evidential proof, always. The bottom line: you, sir, are not a scientist. You are a hypocrite extraordinaire who worries about his hairline without ever wondering if you might be the reason that you are aging so far ahead of your time. Put down the pint, Punyboy. You will go from paltry palfrey to show pony pretty nearly overnight, and maybe you will learn something beyond a pipsqueak’s notion of how to stay that way.

Why the hell I failed to pay closer attention to the overt ojez of your critically narrow Overton Window back when I still had the chance to observe its propagandic proportions to my advantage, eons before you were trading me like old baseball cards for Loser Cuntry Coffee Beans and screen-printed granny-tote bags, I will never guess. Elizabeth Bowen did shrewdly point out: “There are certain things that a woman who’s being happy keeps putting out of her mind. (I mean, when she’s being happy about a man).” I see with shocking clarity however that, had I, rather than riding round and round on the lazy susan of your emotional incapacity, I could have been spending my energy on people who are brave enough to receive and return it. As it stands, I have never had a choppier person in my life than you, and I know I never shall again because no one else will ever be let as near as where you lived inside my heart. It’s amazing how completely one common man can corrode the multiple levels of life inside an extraordinary woman. One might think it would be a little bit like having a drummer with a sliding groove, someone with timing that sways, but instead it just shows how hard everything hits when the only person in the duo holding the sticks has no rhythm at all and can only count to one.

I do know that men are notoriously hard with the sacred feminine and sickeningly soft with the madonna, as a rule. Amazing the scope of what they throw away with such flippant ease as they attempt to avoid thinking about why that is. With me, I almost feel like you picked something as low as the musical grafter that you did only because it was the furthest thing from what your subconscious knew you were standing next to. The narrative in your head must have been a doozy: It’s only her after all. The heteroclite Hippolyta. The friend that would live and die in the street for you. We can’t be stopping the clock for her, Jesus. Just think: there are all those soul-killing routines to keep going and death-inducing banalities you agreed to when you were 16 to feign still caring about. March on, soldier! You didn’t think I was worth the ‘hard thing’ you had to do to keep me, even though it wasn’t the slightest bit hard at all, but I could name something that very much was. You couldn’t even cop to that one, much less process what it meant for you, about you, and around you.

The masturbatory method by which you listen to music nearly killed me several times–you are not even privy to a tenth of any given song or artist’s real-time emotional input. You’re just there to let the music scratch yourself where your social cues tell you can’t be scratched politely or manfully elsewhere. Music, including mine, for you, is just one more bro-huggy bit of self-brainwashing. Of all the things that broke my heart about you, this was the swerving silver bullet. Likewise, let’s be sure you are clear, once and for all: you do not have a “sensitive nature,” like you believe. None whatsoever. You have a selfish nature. All you feel anything for is your own misplaced feelings and the way that they are mirrored back to you by other ineffectual regionalites. As David Bowie said it best: “The person who wants the most affection is the one least able to give it.” One of the hardest parts for me in the wake is trying to get cool with the fact that the website, the songs, the poems, the books…they have all got to go out in mere moments and you will never remotely understand any of them. You’ll never, ever get it–and I have to get that. I have to send them out knowing that the person who was supposed to get everything all the time (and get it first in line!) will never even be last in the queue for comprehension of what all this means. You won’t even be in the same solar system when it breaks, Inhaler-style.

You have a lot of self-satisfaction masquerading atop almost zero self-awareness. Not only can you not tell the difference, you would not be bothered by it even if you could as superpositioning has you stumped too. Humanism…my phat ass! Your type try to make it so that the outlying female has no foothold because the where and the way she will kick puts a right-angled hole in your half-cooked mimesis of a hypnagogic life. Sorry not sorry, honey. Some of us really are super typhoons (and we do know how you like it supersoaker drenched as most of your wives are so Moab dry). Most of us, because we are so, so sick of your weakness and the way it behaves around our strength simply retreat as far into the forest as we can foray, and leave you to it because we have better things to do than be your caveats and cacoethe. Well, I am not stepping back for any of you abditive assholes. Do your worst. I’m going to do what I always do and what I was born for: I stay. And I tell the story.

“A thing said aloud grows teeth,” Kingsolver rightly observed, but I say fangs, and when mine find their home in your neck, you won’t mistake it for the necking sessions you could barely wank about without blushing. Unfortunately for you, your story is going to be told this time, and no amount of daddy screaming will silence me because not one of my massacre screams ever reached the dumb ears of the sadist sexists like you I was standing next to whilst I was expiring. What, was I in need of a birdy voice and a bad case of help-me-please for your man-dog whistling ears to hear me? I have cried myself in two for you, pruned myself down to the sipping root, but you do-one moor boys don’t seem to know much about gardening for gorse and I scraped bottom on sympathy for your skills-starvation some time ago. Everybody knows that innocence has always been the slaughter-pig of the world, but I will not let you take mine for the throat cutting without the fight of your worthless life. As Atreyu, a distinctly non-barmpotted, real-deal hero once said, “If we’re all about to die anyway, I’d rather die fighting.”

There is a dissertation to be written on what it signifies that an outsider woman speaking the simple, provable, factual truth of her experience is viewed as retaliation by nearly all of society but men tell completely bent truths daily and no one thinks they are vindictive. When they do it behind closed doors, what follows is always more closed doors for women. You can call me anything you want in response to being called out for your cruel exclusion and erasure of me. I am going to call you exactly what you are, to everybody and come what may. I will not spend my life in limbo where you tried to relegate me once I was useless to you, or under the invisibility cloak you call politesse. If a statement of truth feels rude to you, you can go to bed each night knowing for sure and certain that you are the whole of the problem.

Retaliation is not a dirty word like the self-help sods you let scribble all over your straight-line scrim would have you believe. Wherever striking back involves pure truth-telling and brings any form of balance to the spreadsheet of suffering, it should always be done because it is always right to settle scores one’s ancestors and offspring could benefit by. Women are not to blame for what men do to them, and nor will this one ever apologize for having more heavy artillery at her disposal when they stoop like you did to mistreating me. If you didn’t want an air strike, you should have cared at the right blare or picked a woman born without wings to screen your midlife fantasies on. You could not have thought one such as me would ever lie flat for you or  be mounted on the wall like what you are used to. I endured your dry disappointment, and sometimes even ridicule, almost daily for refusing to submerse my head as I dog-paddled through your damnable detachment, and you went on every day contaminating our union with your hidden motives but acting like my nose hitting on the putrid water was the problem. You’re not a fugitive from our friendship, you emotional extortionist! You’re a fugitive from your failure to face yourself. You are owed whatever hardships you get from that and then some after the kind of everlasting hurts you have inflicted and then ignored, and the fact you could have fixed all of this with a flick of the wrist but didn’t shows you to be not just unfathomably self-centric but irretrievably, classically stupid as well. Thereby the point on my teeth is a torment you invited, so wear it like the only honorable thing that will ever happen to you, for that is what even my revenge represents in your nothing life. I accept none of your diminishing commentary about supposed “high ground” either. All that is in a scenario like this with centuries-old unequal power dynamics is further attempted conditioning of women to stand down to squirrelly shitbirds like you, and I will never. I don’t think you ever grasped that I was telling your Baroque eirenicons to eat shit and die every day because you were obstinately penning their contents with my blood and trying to tell me with a straight face that I didn’t feel the knives you used to obtain that crimson inkhorn, all while you had not a scratch on you and had no clue what it meant that you were fecklessly cutting the babe version of Blixa Bargeld.

Simon Hattenstone once said of Shelby Lynne that she was a woman that sounded like she “knew pain, but wasn’t wedded to it.” Goodness, don’t I envy Shelby and strive to be like her there. Your “vows” that married me to a lifelong, searing pain not meant for me even before your abrupt and permanent Benedict Arnoldism were endured as follows:

I can’t get past that I don’t like this side of you. When I stood up for myself the way that you should have been dying to do. All whilst you claim to be so pro-woman. Though this was a cut from which I will never recover, the irony would make it hilarious if it were not so devastating and heartbreaking.

He’s right at the top where I want you to be. Spoken about a once-per-week audiophiliac weakling acquaintance who shared nothing with you beside all your slithering self-interest to a ride-or-die friend who would have done anything for you and who had already at that early hour handed you nothing short of the world. Where I want you to be…I come back to that part several times per day when little things remind me how very much I was building the scaffolding that would be your “top” right at that very moment in time, but had no idea of it.

You mean less. The worst day in the whole month that expired between this jewel falling from your mouth and the beginning of the end was the one that contained my slack-jawed realization that this one wasn’t a slip-up of syntax or spirit on your part. You meant this. Of all the San Andreas-sized faultlines we have fallen down since that inceptive volcanic fulmination, it is still the one that skins my knees most violently when I trip over its trapdoor anew each day.

I will pick you up and put you down. Though you did waffle a hopeful half-second on this harrowing one when you came back in words you now insist you only said so that I would keep loving you my big way.

I do love you. I think what we’ve established is not as much as you love me. Hospitals are fun.

I have lost respect for you. I think less of you. I still can’t tell if the shock I feel every time I read or think about these is more grounded in the dumbfounding fact that you could ever think those words, or rooted in the second layer of shock that you could think them in relation to my honest response to an inherently harmful situation that you could never face. Certainly if anyone should be “losing respect” for anyone…and yet I could never even so much as hedge up to thinking these words about you privately to myself, much less ever saying them, even now. I suppose this is how we know you were right about that one just before.

You got your funeral. Take care. Upon a revelation of pervasive self-inflicted death dreams. What a ‘good man’ you are indeed.

I’m not ranking friends. Ha! This one still makes me laugh outright. Don’t worry dear Vocation votary, Mother Nature already definitively did that for you, but if you were not going to honor her unflinching hierarchy, you could have said so long before I gave you everything a person can give and then some.

I don’t care what you think about that. “And these are the words of a gentleman.” –Lizzie Bennett.

It’s been a very positive day. On a literal blind-death Monday of total absence and death-inducing dissipation.

The days we don’t talk are easier. A day without talking to you in the past would’ve been horrible. To think, I was Phil Collins’ and Philip Bailey’s “Easy Lover” though.

And the not-so-grand daddy of them all: I still care. Just not the way I made you believe. No further context needed for that level of cop-out cruelty, but an Emmy-winning performance for a.) the preservation of your facade b.) your wife. In that order.

These wounding summations. For a lifer tax tyrant you sure don’t know much about seamless demergers, do you? What a list of lodestone one-liners when you see them all together like that innit? Imagine trying to keep them all in one little symploce-soaked head like I have had to do all these many months that will soon turn to dusty years. They are not just crucifixions of what you should have been cherishing about us (and me), they are raw emeralds you stole from our most dreamlike future as friends. How could I ever have survived you? Mine was a heart for animal crackers and air plants, and you were a lout who couldn’t tell the galactic difference between Debbie Gibson and Kate Bush. I had thought we were Rama and Sita, but the moment you had to cut the albatross of the charade you have lived all your life, Ravana spewed out of your mouth like winged aphids. If you have a hummingbird heart like mine, you dream that these people will feel the absence of the buzz. They do not. Your absence does not register to them any more than your quality did when they still had your light in their hands, illuminating everything for them but what was already visibly crepuscular to all but them within the lacuna of their own faces. Whatever their Love-At-Level-2 hearts are capable of feeling in terms of regret over what they have done to you translates to nothing more than re-strategized coping once you are gone.

Coping is what these people are best at because it is the verb that gets them through another day on their verbless Hera-hearth hamster wheels and the cane they use to keep limping forward is usually a limb they’ve torn off a Nicksian she-wolf like me. It’s a right bitch to remember to become the verb when these people leave too, because the whole reason they ever sought you was for medieval mystery words to apply to their old, tired lives. Sometimes I’ll see a recent picture of you and think that I see the horror of what you have done all over your face. You look twice as drawn as you did before, when it was only the kids and the cornerless-ness of your life that was killing you. Other times, I think that’s just me, once again, imagining you as a much better person than you will ever be. You are nowhere near emotionally intelligent enough to hurt that bad. You are far too selfish to ever know the spiritual suspension bridge where emotional pain becomes permanent physical alteration. Re-knowing that I was Rhodopsin and you were a rodent is a task every morning. There were no drastic legions in you, after all. There was not even any knighthood to strip you of. Your only fasces was your faithlessness and yet… If you fall I will catch you, I’ll be waiting…time after time.

Perhaps the most obvious craquelure on this youngish crone is that I am not ritual-deficient with my friendships. The world may have forgotten what having Young Guns-level pals means, but I have not and will never. Friends versus who makes you feel better about what you’re not facing are two distinct categories in life, but these are other hard-drawn lines that bowl your piteous idea that we are all one right into the skip, where I want you to be. You are indeed a coward, just like your ‘loving’ wife proclaimed–but not for the pro rata reasons she laid out. She spoke only from what she could see from within the Wardian case of your shared bathrooms and bank accounts. I speak from the deeper place–the place she has never seen, and never will set eyes on because you can only say so many hard-true words to a person with whom you’ve built nothing but a soft-true world–and one hinging entirely on the bear market of shared blankets, no less. So much of your marriage, whether you can admit it to yourself or not, was founded on the unspoken supposition that you’d never do any better, and you hated yourself enough to fully believe that shit. So, what terrified you most about me was finding out not only that that hadn’t ever been true, but just how untrue it really was, and how unwelcome your honorarium style of solidarity really is to a solid person. You could have had a friend like me. You could have had a lot of truly spectacular things, but all of them require leaving your birthling shire.

The other hugely significant place you do not engage the lack that led you to me is in recognizing where the initial attraction for you and she was about where and how your insecurities met up. The self-hating man who thinks he’s unattractive and the overweight woman who keeps to herself is a longstanding archetype with even longer standing legacies, none of them good, but none of this has ever occurred to you because it isn’t convenient to your breadline mentalities that taught you to “be happy with your lot.” Your life with me in it was not readable to you–and if you’d been on your feet at all that should have been your signal. There was me, in my daisy-printed bellbottoms, standing in alchemical wonder under your miscegenation law, torching stacks of hell money while you bloviated excuse after excuse about whatever was germane to the scut work you call your life, not addressing why we were us at all. I had thought you were the sort of man who would instinctively think of Diana on coronation day, but it was you that was the clumsy interloper the whole time. All I care about now is you admitting out loud why my proximity in that regard was and remains your one true luff (the yachting kind not the Celtic homophone for you-know-what, but man didn’t I believe it?). I am, and will always be, something different, darker, and more primal about your nature, something nearer to the ninja noir of your might-have-beens and elbow-adjacent to the notabilia that might save your life even still. When you were not rapaciously shushing me you were taping my mouth shut with despair over the possibility in all this. You do not know how to love anyone properly because you are so many lightyears way from loving yourself. It’s worse even than that. You despise yourself in all the most desperate, interior ways, and were unnerved by how much and how fervently I could love all the parts of you that you hate and a whole bunch more that you (nor anyone else in your life) can even see. The so-called “love” you bear your wife would not keep a one-day-dirty sock out of the washing machine, and yet you claim it is your life’s best thing (mostly to convince yourself and the neighbors). These are the places my ongoing pity makes camp beside the river of my rage from time to time. Sometimes I look at pictures of your drooping, tired face and all I see is a marked-down lawn chair still waiting without optimism for a home in October.

I well know that you will spend all your post-me days trying to prove to yourself and her (and via an unholy host of cringe-worthy platitudes of action and word, no less) that nothing you did over here was accurate or heartfelt, that none of it matters like the veneer you call your vows over there. You will snack-size me all the way down to digital pheromones and forget everything about us, I do know. You already called me a “Whatsapp dynamic” straight to my face (and that was so early!) so what’s one more lifetime of forgeries to a person who is almost as much a complete virgin to self-actualization as he is to proper sex itself. You kept saying “if you only knew that was never my intention,“ as if a person's true outline was somehow resident in what he or she consciously thought. I hate to be the bearer of the baddest possible news, but: there’s a world beneath intentions, and that’s the world you and I walked the beach in. It’s also the only place the real truth resides. While I fully see that a precondition to your altricial existence and emotional catatonia is this blistering bunburying technique that keeps your balls conveniently buried, there is a reason you consciously did the things you did, and underneath all of that is the subconscious motivation, which is far more important because it derives from a place within you that breathes untouched by the conditioning that rules the rest of your mind. I would have thought that you had begun examining some of that a long time before I walked into your life, but I came to learn that self-examination in your world only meant loosely, lightly, and with no applied pressure at all touching on things you were aware of, never even thinking of spelunking down for what you are still-to-this-day unaware of. Another place you are relentlessly unmotivated and very like your home.

You hated me for my sidewinding sonar too, though your Method acting commitment to the ‘good man’ role self-importantly and solemnly dictates that you cannot ever use words like ‘hate’ or ‘retard’ (even and especially where they are true) because King Nice & The Court of Your Social Anxieties says so, and we know it’s very important that you seem nice, not that you actually be it. Nevertheless, if you really get down to it, all those months of problems were only you trying the latch on my door with different angles of the same perjuries you tell everybody else in your life and getting increasingly more frustrated at the fact that, no matter how you twisted your untruths, they would not get past the porters at the Southern Oracle. It’s me that was forever dutifully bedecking the altar of Billy the Kid, me that worshiped bandits and abided by bonafide outlaw rules in all things, but look at you and your Ponzi scheme. The white-collar tax scammer of the day, this one. Irvine Welsh once described Renton, brilliantly, as a “scheme junkie.” Wouldn’t ole Irv twist his foot right and proper over you if he only knew though. Don’t blame the person who caught you in your lie for the feeling you had inside when you got busted trying to pass it off as truth. Try telling the actual truth, all the time, no matter what it costs you, even if, as in your case, it will surely cost you your whole life.

Everything you have subscribed to in your personal and professional worlds is founded on shared pretenses of varying degrees and in crippling colors. How that all fell down when something unswerving and true showed up on your front doorstep for the first time in your life is also not my fault. Perhaps build no more “family homes” on fraternalistic notions of your own rotting wood (all puns absolutely intended) and you will not have that problem, but do build forth in future knowing ahead of time that the concrete of undistilled honesty is quite expensive by “working class lad” standards and likely to be ill-received down the pool hall with your “mates.” The only thing mediocre people consistently do is get drunk and forget. Even more than you need to learn proper debate skills, you need to learn how to be wrong.

We should have been untouchably sacred to you, as much as any part of your life and a great deal more than most of it. You said that we were, over and over. But the second you were held accountable to living up to the changes our friendship brought in your life, you tried to pretend I was the wrong kind of adscititious. I was forced to spend weeks explaining and re-explaining structural sexism to you, all while you plugged your ears like a child on the playground because feeling like you’re not a misogynist is far more important to you than actually ceasing to be one.

I was shocked to learn that you have no meta anywhere in your life. You’re demonstrably incapable of thinking about your own thoughts to any place that would require you to alter them. You could not parse your own predilections in any of my calling out of them. Ultimately, you found out that you are not anywhere near as smart as you thought you were. Had you been a real man, the fact that I am would have turned you on. The fact it automatically turned you not just off but defensive is where every single piece of inside work you have in front of you starts and finishes. If you think it’s so “hard” to find out that you’re the gaslighting griot of an agelessly woman-scarring tale, imagine having to teach yourself anew every day how to put on aposematic camouflage just to protect yourself from someone that you had more affection for than will ever be recorded or understood.

What is sad is that you don’t have the energy to change your life because of your life, which, ironically, stands as the strongest piece of evidence that you absolutely must, and should have long ago. Either that or commit yourself to reading “Uses of the Erotic” by Audre Lorde and one Camille Paglia piece per day for the rest of your life until you understand. Grossest of all is watching you mime loyalty to the socially legislated relationships you have traded our very real one for, all while you further your disloyalty to yourself and me (in that order) in the process. As usual, your limited perspective makes you think it is a series of ticked boxes on a ‘balanced’ ballot. In reality, you are as poor a performer of Pavlovian devotion as you were a trustworthy friend. What I would really like to do is box up one of my gratitude journals from the year I met you and mail it over. Let that drop in your work mailbox one day so you can see how often you were mentioned in a notebook that was dedicated entirely to things I was grateful for. And I was so grateful for you. A laugh with a semiautomatic smile now.

You are so, so much sicker than your secrets. As per usual, my smile comes from knowing what you do not yet, videlicet that you wouldn’t have to try if any of it were true. I have come to think of it as a good thing you consigned yourself to the paper-thin possibilities that you did. You could not survive one week out here where papyrus fragments like me wear pastel tuxedo jackets and we codices creatures never hesitate to scream, to cry, to sing like starfish on the floor rather than being just another edible installation in your life. You live like a flat adverb; there is no “ly” in you. Me walking in put paid to your post-mortem penis.You are the scant and microbial film floating atop the ocean of what I am capable of even whilst I am fourteen fathoms past asleep. I am the peat that burns your house down without a match even being struck. I did always want to be someone’s scorching prequel.

The sky is all unnameable patterns and heights of vanilla today, an Electric Canberra flown by Psyche’s sister Orual. These diolch-drenched days are so precious. I cannot stand for a moment to pass, you cannot disagree with what you do not understand, and these are the things you were destined to learn from me. You don’t get the last word when all of your words to the truest person in your life have been deceitful. May your flat whites from your false friend forever sync with your flatlines. At long last, I am starting to gain back my ground, beginning to push past people at the back of the pack I was born leading, despite the limp of my loving you. I have spent the afternoon sowing wildflower seeds while still in my pink Snoopy pajamas, knowing full well that the glee of this eupeptic eulogy for your echo will draw all the best pollinators, feeling parliamentary about it all. Freedom is everything.

Dana Miller is a wicked wordsmith, giggling provocateuse, and mega-melomaniac from Atlanta, Georgia. Her poetic syllables like to trundle in the wilds—usually in search of a Pooh-inspired smackerel or two. On their way, they have found themselves featured in Postscript Magazine, Small Leaf Press, Better Than Starbucks, Fairy Piece, Sledgehammer Lit, FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and Nauseated Drive. When not wielding a lethal pen, Dana adores surf culture, all things U2, Australian grunge rockers, muscle cars, Epiphone guitars, glitter, Doc Martens, and medieval-looking draft horses with feathered feet. She is still actively working toward her lifelong dream of one day being some cosmic blend of Twiggy, Emily Brontë, and Cyndi Lauper. Oxford, England is her forever spirit-home and Radiohead is holding the last shard of her girlhood heart.