Until Then

Thanksgiving

Drunk, high, in the arms of our lovers on our average Saturday nights. Drinking, or drunk. Fucking, or being fucked. And here we all are, grouped together, reverted back in my cousin’s child-sized bedroom. Blow-up beds strewn, piles of blankets at our feet on the floor. Being called “kids” by my aunt, the group of us, some married, engineers, all “kids” in the eyes of a woman who has already seen several decades into each of our futures. And I suppose this is what being 23 is. An amalgamation of we-know-betters and you-shall-find-its. I blanch in the face of this inverted wet cement, knowing full well there are no firm barriers to contain the shape I’m taking.

I was waiting to find the person best prepared to jump the chasm of my grief. We love those who are whole already, everybody says so. My ex-girlfriend was the type of person who had enough faith in humanity to get her best friend’s initials tattooed on her back, and not develop a complex over it when they abruptly stop talking two years later. I was the type of person who bought drugs from the baddest lesbian in my Western Civ class, and then cut class the next day to smoke them with my best friend in the woods by the lake. We all grew up to be the type of people who have no problem drinking in abandoned parking lots, but not all with as much fervor as I feel, furry and sharply focused inside me at the same moment. I have often assumed juxtaposition will one day tear me apart: the feeling of two wholly opposite things, both striving to fill the same space. Meeting like the cold and hot front before a tornado commences.

“The conditions of this premises are imminently perilous to life.” That’s what the sign read, and yet you climbed through the fire escape anyway, wholly prepared to lose yourself in the dive toward infinity. The conditions of my life are sometimes imminently perilous to my life. The girl in my poetry class said it was like the ground falls out from beneath my feet when I write; when I narrate. Like everything was inverted, and logic became fallacy, writ large. She is right. I was born inside out, flashing wrong signals like a first-time driver. Until now. I always say, I always say. I wrote larger just to make this known, that everyone was here, and we lost no one in the fire.