one day my name will be crone. one day my name will be mangled corpse.
sometimes, in the dark, my name is bitch.
i can beg AND i can choose AND i can run short distances at moderate speed, but i will have a vagal response of sorts the longer i go.
i am not a born athlete or a born loser.
i had to try very hard to be either, and most of the time i’m one and not the other.
i am rarely an athlete.
i am mostly a loser.
performing loserdom exhausts me.
i have been attenuated by this life of relentless performance.
my bones are thin and snappable but no one comes to to snap them thinly.
i have to do everything around here.
i accepted culpability in a general sense for my various crimes.
i was sentenced to a decade of tunneling.
i tunneled in my room.
i tunneled in my body.
i tunneled the pith away from the peel.
i tunneled your parents into a divorce.
i tunneled a hole into the ground so deep you couldn’t see the bottom from the top.
i found an opal, it was so dazzlingly beautiful when it reflected the light from my headlamp.
it looked like the whole world was in it.
i had no pockets in my clothes so i put the opal in my mouth, for safekeeping.
i put you in my mouth, sometimes, for safekeeping.
i was at the bottom, and i bootstrapped myself back up.
they’re right. it’s lonely at the top.
you hit me in the face when i emerged, and i understand why you would.
you hit me again and i didn’t fight back. i bit my tongue so hard i bled.
but worse yet, i swallowed the opal.
in that moment of humiliation i hated you completely.
it’s so bitchmade, to hit a girl bootstrapping herself out of a tunnel.
you have to cut me open to get the opal.
the opal is incontrovertible proof.
the opal means the tunneling was for something and not nothing.
the opal means the magic bullet of my work will have a significant trajectory.
hurt me the right way this time.