Closed on Sunday

There’s something dull and gray about friends who make me feel self-conscious.

It’s a confusing confinement. A sinister breeze. A long shaky breath in the belly.

In retrospect, I’ve always known when I was in danger.

I have intuition. There’s an idea. I’m praying for a way.

I’m learning in my early twenties that trust is the fundamental soil of anything that’s trying to grow.

Recently, especially these past few months, friends have been giving me splinters. I don’t know what to do about it. Sometimes I convince myself that I’m a carpenter and that this is normal.

I’ll keep the splinter in if it means I can still keep the friend.

I’ll hold the roses even with all the thorns.

I can grip the hurt by the throat asking for it to stop. I try to be nice, and I aim to love but why is it that my friends sometimes, make me blue? Why do they give me a cold cup? Why am I passed a stale and expired piece of bakery bread?

“What’s the saying?’ My therapist looks at me with a slant.

“I’m spraying perfume in my wounds because I know she likes the smell. But who am I without memory? I don’t know what to do.”

I'm washing my bones with a Scrub Mommy sponge and sometimes crying in a bubble bath.

I’m swimming in my wine.

I’m performing autopsies on my acts of love, wondering if it was ever real–if it was ever enough.

I tell my boyfriend that my head is filled with lice.

“Sentimental lice” and he gets it.

It’s 2 am and he makes me laugh til I sleep.

I think love is never a waste. It was never a mistake.

I’m okay with my wants without having to beg for a brown and thick letter of acceptance.

I’ll eat my blueberries and mind my business. I’ll wash my face and go drink in the sun. I can’t bloom surrounded by dead weeds and hungry worms. I can’t deal with the phone calls and the fake fairies. I’m taking my roots elsewhere.