Note 9

When my lungs are filled with the pungent taste of a bitter flower and my brain latches onto the sweetness that its psychoactive properties elicit, my eyes are still not as red. I’m not sure I’ve seen such bloodshot circles before, certainly not while gazing into a dirty mirror.

•••

The truth is: we never talked about it, how it made me feel, how I left. The truth is: grief is attached so keenly to me that it must be extracted from the deepest part of my marrow. Did you know that marrow saves lives? Did you know my grief saved mine? What’s deeper than bone, than skeleton, than the muscle that makes up a body? What lies beyond the marrow? What slithers in between the grief? What is a flowing flower to a buzzing bee?

•••

I don’t know what to say to you. Words never evade me, but somehow they do now. I don’t know how to mine my grief and repurpose it into a language you’ll understand. Will you ever understand? The little girl in me is still desperate for you to. And I must break her heart consistently, a perennial truth placing her desires out of reach, killing her dreams, excising her optimism. I must tell her that you weren’t meant to be enough. How?

•••

I’ve mourned dead things until they’ve come back to life

Cried tears that formed deltas against my placid skin

Pores filled with briny drops of what I refuse to release

Dig deep into the marrow of me

Past the scars that arose from the dusty fields, the dirty gyms

Past the metal they screwed into me

Past the pieces that are on the brink of severance, a tenuous conduit

Between me and me

I’ve mourned dead things until they’ve begged me to kill them

Take a hatchet to the underside of their placid chin

Take a knife to the artery in their putrid neck

Squeeze them until the marrow runs out

And I’ll still find a way to raise them from the dead

let me go

let me go

let me go

How?

1. Dig deep into your marrow to disinter puddles of murky tears

2. Siphon through the montage of memories that sting like the burn from a butane lighter

3. Kill the sacred ties that bind you like roots attached to tree

4. Let the agony splinter your heart until its pieces are tinier than the strips a shredder makes

5. Rip the metal out of the places they tried to fix you; dislodge like a rusted screw

6. Anoint yourself with the smell of smoking grief; let the heavenly sear wet your eyes like a sweet onion

7. And let me go like only you know

how

– Dierra Barlow