(tonight)

XVIII.

         Two nights before I turned 19, I said aloud to myself: "Tonight I'm shaky and strange and dreaming, my throat is tight, I'm hunched and red-cheeked and cold-handed. The red netted pattern of my blood vessels shows through all of my skin, everywhere. I get a shiver up one side of my back, a million smooth pieces clicking together, mutedly, and like a wave through a sea of dried beans. Then one goes up the other side, then again up the first, then both together with a right-side lead. Bent neck, numb toes (the three right-most). Pulled, squished inside the skull, sad. Don't bother with me, I feel like saying. Tonight is for you, not for me. Tonight is for her and him and her and him and him and him and her and him, and when I was sure it wouldn't be for him, I thought it would finally be, in its own way, for us; but tonight is for him and her, too. I was cruel and presumptuous with him, and I want to take it back, but I never told him I assumed and so I have nothing, of all of the things made his, to reclaim. Tonight is not for me. Tonight for me is nothing, and it feels like everything. Tonight I stumbled shoeless into words that sank in clear and shallow water, words that I threw, for me, and waters that still display the words brightly, but not my pulsating toes, which are buried in settled silt. I wandered everywhere, nervous, loose, laughing; not nervous at first, but venturing and stupid and spitting as I talked, so that the dream turned conscious in another sort of way, an old way, the reprehensible way, and now I am reproachful. I'm slow, I've been so slow, and nobody responds to my emails. I was happy to be dirty and playing in the dust on the shelf by the three-pronged plugs, but in my sleep, without seeing it, I felt the need to build, from the top down. In my sleep all I felt was the need, so I squealed that I was more than dust, and lost it all---everything I was pretending to have, even the dust. Now I have lenses that aren't blurry but do not focus, a hunch born of a shiver, and self-reproach like the air hanged by the wind of my own voice that came and swept it all away, and I miss reveling in the dirt.

         "Tonight I picked the other cake, it had eight candles but I didn't count them. I didn't see my mother light them as I watched her hands. I didn't watch her blow out the candles of her cake, although I remember seeing her make a wish. I said 19 was divisible by eight, I wish for nothing, and blew them out, blowing powdered sugar everywhere. I said gloam and floam and Dad said loam, and he was right, and I didn't sing Happy Birthday with the others. I let them sing to me, and for me to her. Like I was too focused on the skin that separates me from the rest, too focused to sit at home and care for her from me. I said I'm sorry to my grandmother as she left; she was in pain and I've been everywhere else but home and not visited her this week. I spent this week in my house, not leaving it much, but never settling, always with my faces planted to the walls, looking outwards but only seeing the in-side, the walls. And the daffodils we got for her and me bloomed all at once, without anyone to love them with time and mind, and my daffodils will all be dead before I notice them, and hers will all be dead before she receives them. We are too busy.

         "I am wearing my favorite black tights and black boots and blue dress and eggplant cardigan, and my favorite scarf around my hair makes me feel like stealing out into the night. Because I could be Robin Hood and Peter Pan and still a girl. But I dressed up for dinner, not for playing pretend and climbing fire escapes to rooftops downtown."

         I said, "Tonight is not for me." And yet here, it always is.