meat

The truth is, I want to kill myself.

I’m tangled in constructs like twine, sticky with social spiderwebs, made to move like a macabre puppet. Why’re you a puppet? you say to me, and then you stick your hand up inside and mime the right response from my lips.

I think about you walking out the door, and how I’ll sit, split, in the bathtub for an hour or two, deciding what to do, reveling in the steam and the heat and the swell. And how you’ll come home to a corpse, and when I think about it, the blood is always still bright red, and I’m beautiful, like Snow White in a clear coffin under the trees and some cumulus. Alive without air.

I’ll become holy. Warred with, sainted, elasticized around memories and wishful thinking, the everlasting puppet you can make say anything, do anything. Cut my words up and paste them in a halo around your heart, in your order. Cut off my face and wear it to work, while my hands prop up your chin, my knees jiggle under the desk. Ache in a simple way for the me you’ve made up, who’s really you, which is why you care at all.

And after I’ve been cursed and blessed and mourned and hated and loved and broken and solved and cornered and pedestaled and anointed and warned and beheaded and born again, you’ll die too. All of you. And you’ll realize it was all for nothing, because I never was a daughter or a mother or a lover or a writer or a woman or a suicide.

I was only trapped, and then escaped.

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