Identity

She withdraws from her name, wondering why, as a child, she wrote it on everything she owned - black magic marker on a backpack, silver paint pen on a leather jacket, the image etched into her flesh by a man named Shaker. There aren't statues of cats, at least, posed and lined up on wooden shelves hanging on the wall. She never would have gone that far.

She forgot how it started. Maybe a joke or a boyfriend's observation about the shape of her eyes? It wasn't long after she heard the name in the hallways that she began painting her eyes thick and black, and started wearing stockings that left red crisscross patterns on her knees.

Then the nights came when her mother was gone, and her stepfather played solitaire next to a row of beer cans at the kitchen table, and she sat behind the locked door of her walk-in closest, taping pictures to the wall that had been drawn by boys with steady hands. Sometimes she would stand under the bare bulb, lick her finger, and smudge the lines until fine bits of gray paper peeled up, just to ease the time away.

She liked the name mixed with liquor in the mouths of sweaty boys, but even more when they screamed it through thin gaping lips. Naked, except for their tight black jeans and studded belts, they cursed her name until they forgot it, all of them.

It seemed fitting, she thought one day, while painting her eyes beneath the glow of a bare bulb in the dressing room, that the DJ should call out the name whispered in love so many times but soon forgotten.

Beautiful People

There is a place between my gut and my heart that hunches my shoulders whenever it longs to connect on a deeper level. I've used the strumming of a guitar or the tone of a voice to relieve the guard around my emotions.

But then it isn't enough anymore and I'm left raw, hands cupped, holding vivid images of people from my past.

It isn't easy to touch them in my mind alone, and sometimes I wonder if I am supposed to remember them at all. It doesn't seem right that I should relive pieces of their lives without consent. But I guess we all do that. I'm not as separate as I think I am.

_________

"You don't belong among pretty things," he told me.
I kissed the patch of white skin below his eye.

He picked up the guitar and stretched the skin that had been grafted onto his hand sometime before I met him. I spread my legs across the thin plaid fabric on the couch and tucked my feet under his crossed leg. It was Saturday night and we had nothing better to do than hide in his house with our demons.

A voice like rain drizzling on a parked car filled the living room. He tried to tuck a loose dreadlock behind an ear that wasn't there. I relaxed and let a damaged spirit escape a beautiful body.

This had to be the place I was born...in a house where neither of us cared if the lights were on. He was physically scarred, carrying a dead wife and child in his heart. I hid my damage behind flawless skin and taut muscle.

I needed to show my ugliness. He needed to feel beautiful sitting next to someone else.