A Public Bonfire

AUG 2022

I was watching Russian Doll today at Bruno’s house while taking care of Ben. Episode One, Season Two: “you are loving, you deserve love.” Words that nearly broke me on an L-shaped couch, feeling equally gray, equally lonely.

Lonely.

A word with the double “L” sound, like lulling, like your tongue flat-lining into that dull closed-mouthed sort of sound. I wish I could say I felt worthy of love. A word associated with the color red and petals pressed and memories cherished. But I don’t feel worthy or deserving or even close to love and being loved for the whole of me, not just the façade of me. Because the pretty words and the cultivated character of Martina, the Martina employers or best friends see, isn’t the me I need loved.

I want the crying, regressed siren-fearing child-me to be plucked from the blue-and-red dual toned past. I want her to be hugged, carried from that place to anywhere else. I remember scared and scarred. I want something bold to somehow heal—a panacea to all the pain. A person that loves the flawed and jumbled-up person I am. Because I, even though I have tried, cannot love myself, cannot pluck that two-year-old from that once all too real nightmare.

I wish that the person that I love could ever want to be the person who is ‘base’ or safety. Like kids playing tag, when I touched him for the first time, I felt for a second like no other touch, from all my memories of shame and hate and of anger, could pull me from “happy.” I was happy.

And he was empty. Is, maybe still, a shell. Becoming something. Going through a re-birth or a metamorphosis. But stuck in weakened walls, filled with a sort of empty. How do you love an echo? Walls and sounds stuck. Feelings stuck. Remembering the past. Singing a wallowing sound.