idealistic girls are doomed

grief and love are one and the same. but I'd rather just be stupid and happy forever

When I was five I had a big tire swing in the backyard, so high that I thought God must’ve tied it there with ribbon himself. I would lay upon it with my back falling through the doughnut center and my velcro sneakers dangling skyward. I would make up stories about all the girls who came before me; made scuffs on this here tire, broke their wrists jumping from it or climbing its rope to the very top.

Back then the world was pink and yellow. Life was a daydream of a daybed in the attic of my grandmother’s house, canopied in a soft dumpling twist, so like a lantern it glowed at daybreak. Life was two vanilla sandwich cookies dipped in soy milk after supper. Life was old jagged nails and pebble patches and tangled rhizome on haggard little feet. Life was tooth-blood on soft hands with no life-line.

and one soft day it fell like a reactive bow-legged calf into a hay-bale. Its firm base grew loose, see’d and saw’d by hot, hideous breaths until, vomitous and weak, it gave in. Its many children would wiggle loose, each leaf curl and crisp, each ladybug unfurl and find a wet patch of earth on which to, god willing, make love.

I visited the house the day it fell, years after I’d moved out.

The world was starched white, muslin and mothballs, begging for something to dash it. The skin around my hands looked aged, like my mother’s, my cheeks as fresh and full as a babe, wobbling like warm pudding. When I saw the toppled timber I didn’t honestly remember the tire-swing, or the girls next door who pushed me on it. I had looked on glossy kodak prints from my grandmother and made up false memories in my head. I was sad at the idea of it I’d imagined. The world was chalk on a wet tongue, Adderall crushed into lemonade. Life was the girlish hunger for and disgust with sex.

When the world wants you to grow up, it grabs you by the roots and pulls you up and chucks you in the mud.

Grief comes soon after birth-days and graduations and celebratory firsts. Grief and love like a tedious wheel with useless worries in-between to soothe the discomfort of this subconscious knowing.

At eighteen, I laid on uneven plastic flooring of my rats nest bathroom and, phone propped on a Kleenex box, stuck my skinny fingers deep into my throat. Chugged water, re-filled it, chugged some more. Eager urging made my bloodshot eyes oil-slick, a small digitized reflection, a well-painted moment. I wretched til blood and bread came pouring out. Throat hot and swollen, lips pink and wet like rain-soaked worms on a tennis court. I made myself cum with an ice cream scoop and fell asleep on the floor in a pile of filth.

The world was the dull sloshing rattle of an empty stomach, baby powder stench, and tear-soaked lovemaking. Love was bubbling hot water poured down my open gullet, cradling and curdling my innards. Love was a weighted blanket and a pacifier in a fallout shelter.

At twenty-two, the world is clear. The world is always “clear” when you’re living it. In a few years, maybe I’ll look back and say

the world was caffeine jitters, chainmail scratches on skinny arms, the neon flutter of pulsing house music and slish-sloshing vodka-cran.

Grief has been knocking for years, but in the past six months it’s been leaving overdue payment letters in the mail. It’s been leaving ransom notes. It’s stalking me through trader joes, keeping tabs on every good, avoidant day and plotting to drain my savings further. I just can’t pull the trigger, cut the cord, face the music. I have spent so long constructing a reality around blurry Kodak photos and the approving smiles of my loved ones that I have denied all the ugly parts, the stuff I didn’t dare to photograph and tried terribly to not remember.

Life is never as black and white as anyone online wants you to believe. The only people who live in exact accordance with their high principles are those who haven’t lived much at all, who haven’t loved carelessly and completely. Sometimes terrible people have gentle hearts, and sometimes gentle people are rotten at their core. You can repress anything if you desire happiness hard enough; just as you can live in misery despite all there is to be grateful for, if victimhood is what you thrive on. I’ve always refused to be a victim even when victimhood stared me in the face. It’s too humiliating.

I had it, I had it, I had it. I prayed for so long; believed with such fervent faith. I knew my reality was halfway constructed by foolish idealism; and I knew that all joy was to be matched in equal parts with grief. But God help me it was mine, mine alone. I was loved with warm hands. I was loved in bloodshed. I had years to run from inevitable grief, and I stayed, like a dog for the scraps at daybreak¹.

Since I was seven years old, I’ve known that I was so damn specific and so damn naive, that I was prone to a romantic sort of doom. Because I wanted to be a perfect woman, and a perfect woman tears herself, limb by limb, ball joint by ball joint, until she is just a ball of white light for troubled men to revere.

So I crawl to the tire-swing like a toddler. My knees scrape across the mud-crusted ground with my mouth agape like a teenager with over-active salivary glands. I reach for the rope like a tired whore. It’s splayed across the ground like a dead doe. Lichen crawls across the resting trunk and spills onto the graying, deflated rubber. I can’t pretend to be a girl again, but I can lay upon the crescent of mud, spooned by the dead tree and the deader tire swing like a fawn in the bosom of her shot mother. I can lay here and wait for the grief, like a cold, trash-heaped suburban lakeside wave, to wash over me.

1. Kinds of Kindness