Crippled Fingers

I stopped writing last June. The night after you leaned in against the wall and set me down on your groin. Alone in an apartment. Two grown people. One boy. One girl. We kissed. Carefully. You laid your head on my lap, told me you didn’t want to do anything wrong, and I said, lets.

I should’ve known better. But every now and then I let myself be fooled by love songs. They get into my head and start thinking for me: “If loving you is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.” I’m partial to rhythm and blues chiding me along, rubbing my back with a guitar riff, saying, “ Sweet child. Don’t worry ‘bout a thing.” Consequence didn’t scare me the way it does now.

The earthquake of the on-again off-again swagger of our love was what shattered my confidence in the inevitable flow of the universe. It still ripples through me a thousand miles down the road from the damage sight. It shakes my fingers loose from my brain, disables my wrists with carpal tunnel, clogs the arteries around my heart so that every emotional eruption leaves me pallid and comatose. I am still swirling with the reality that you are there and I am here, that we are now two-dimensional – nominal friends. You are there, continuing where you left off before you met me. I am clutching the pieces of myself that splintered after meeting you. Our lives on different planes.

I always thought that I was the stronger one. I would urge you to be your own person. You maddened me with your need to please everyone including me. Couldn’t it be me alone? I always knew what I wanted: you. You only knew what you didn’t want: me. I always knew what you knew – that I am just one of the people you want to see yourself in. We are mirrors, holding you up to yourself.

Play around in my purple pool of dreams where kissing without love is ok. Where people don’t mind being fucked because fucking makes the world go around. Where you can fuck me very much, extend your hand to me, shake it gently. Where the whole damn world is made up of shards of mirrors that fit the blues into the hearts of suburban white teenagers and set Japanese juvenile limbs into frenzied states of popping and locking. Where Korean Baptist churches line snow-covered boulevards in Chicago suburbs. It’s a small world after all. World a after small it’s all. Jo-fucking-der hombre, where is the credibility in virginity?

My mantra is to live intentionally by loving many things. I would do a lot of things for love. I would change countries. Religions even. In the past, I dropped college classes to spend more time with boyfriends. I’ve delayed my life for years because you never know, this could be the one.

But suddenly, I have a run in with purity, and it has marred my perfect world of imperfections. It has marred my acceptance, my encouragement of sin, sin is another dimension of knowing ourselves. Life is a struggle against one’s self – a struggle to unlayer. Making the wrongs write. Let’s.

You believe that purity is something that should be protected because it is fragile, nonrefundable. I am suspicious of purity. I believe that we only begin to live when we are wounded. Do I believe this? Suddenly I am wounded, and I can’t feel my extremities. I’ve forgotten my references. Will I ever be able to write again? What have I done by falling in love with you?

How to love less? I could be Buddhist. I could be like you – Godfearing. Love like Jesus loves, through pain and suffering. I could tune in to the hum of those love songs again, “The only one who could ever teach me was the sun a of a preacher man.” Preacher man, what makes you think that I’m the only one here who got something to learn?

What scares me is that I am still falling. Is God enough for me without the jewelry, the life goals, clothes on my back, a place to live, friends? Am I Job reincarnate? I’d rather be Krishna: married to a thousand wives. But then again, when would I find the time to write?