I believed in the order in the chaos. It was all fucking heartbreak. Surely, life wouldn’t shoot me out the cannon,  ping-ponging me off whatever dangers popped out of pants.  I want to slap my younger self with a potato sack and carry it along with me, a few years down the line to what I’d seen. It’d make all the nights I spent worrying, obsessing, filling notebooks with  pages of poetry I’m embarrased as fuck I wrote–let alone read out loud at poetry slams where I posited I was the next Plath. Fuck.

I watched loves implode as the accidental ‘guilty’ partner, some boyfriend I didn’t know existed walking in on us in the middle of the bump and grindy. And after being thrown against the wall–heh, more than once–I’d sit on the floor and revel in watching my belief  of the linearity of love blow to pieces. They’d blow up at each other, love eyes filling, drowning in rage. Illusions of initimacy that’d they used to tie themselves to their shared bed, would unravel and fling across the room.

And I’d pick them up and carry them back to my room. Looking at them, I realized I was the agent of chaos. Innocence fueled by lust and shots of whiskey led to men in bars and lips that would unlock their own destruction in ‘3, 2, 1…what the fuck is he doing here?’. I never sought it out, but I knew very early that love is, as Josef Salvat put it, ‘a very abritrary road’.

You can live in anxiety, or you can hurtle through space grabbing onto bedsheets and surveying necks you want to run your kisses down, whispering ‘I need you, I believe in you’.  And you will, until you don’t. And that’s fucking ok.  Life is just ‘Open Season’, sometimes the knives will come stabbing for you.

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