Disclaimer:

    I do not own very many soft departures.

                Those belong to everyone else.

---

Once, a vegan princess said to the world, in large eighteen sized font:  
“I washed that mud off my dress. I wasn't sober when I fell

                                       and I'm sorry.”

        I will never have that sort of disregard for the consequences of my consumptions and collapses. I’m not a honey blonde anymore. I don’t wear fabric snagging belts these days or press Cheshire beans into my own skin in hopes of being a less unpredictable breed of poet. My pockets cannot handle raucous bikers snuffing out the blood pulsing behind the framework of my pants anymore. Sometimes I don’t answer the phone; sometimes I don’t want to yank hellos out of my skeleton and sometimes I know who makes me that way. Sometimes I know that I will unerringly pine for the boy morphed me, even if my nerves one fine Tuesday turn into root beer bottles and dumbfounded thunderclaps shatter the rest of my bodily systems.

I also know about who I want to be, all the time. I know that you never understood the beautiful arch of my feet when enclosed in a sock. You never knew what it is like to kiss the naked bone of my shoulder or how terrible it is to watch my face break when I cry. You never touched the puffiness afterwards and you never experienced the way red dots rise up around my eyes as curses, testimonials. They are throbbers, always on about the rhythm of hurt and how just because I am a poet and I can make anything match, doesn’t mean it was okay to hurl stripes and tattered polka dots into my eyes. It was like blinking knives.  You will never quite get it deep enough. You will never watch me trip over the beige rug near my red oak piano or try to stop slouching repeatedly in the middle of Ruby Tuesday’s or see me transfer serenity into the wrist of a stumbling little girl. You will never even know me.

    And I know that. I suppose then that this is leaving. This is taking off without my shoes on. I can’t unplug my curling iron or unknot the white gold chain of us, and I can never magnify enough newspaper clippings to see past the way you scooped me up into your two-language-speaking arms on the best days of my life. I can never do that. I will never do that.

    But I can teach myself things through the permanence. I can know the truths that I can never unknow. I know that I will come out of my door in two years, eighteen and ready to drive towards whatever hurt or happiness my tires come across. I know that by then I will be able to bottle a sunset and pour it into my own eyes whenever they feel dry and lightless.


                 This is putting sunshine in my calves
        and trusting the muscles to grow over the old photographs in my legs.

This is leaving. This is knowing myself.