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Show Moon -18 was a hard thought to hang onto, And something had changed in her since the night she'd walked him home. She could no longer think about being an artist or moving out and living on her own. It was as if some involuntary rite of passage had forbidden this selfishness, finally and forever, and she was consecrated now to serving him. Once she accepted this, she no longer watched the two of them struggling on his sofa, a creature apart, careful and detached, but she abandoned herself, first to shy affection, and finally to the heat of his hands and the damp urgency of his breathing. That it hurt was a kind of relief. That she became, over time, consumed in turn by an unending need for him was a burden to them both. To lie tangled up with him like the clutching branches of a tree was everything and she could not let him go, even when he began to complain of being tired, even when he began to drink again, even when he went away. I did not want to be born, not from this. I knew that things weren't right, knew without the words. With the deadly accuracy of untrained ganglia, I read the sudden rigidities of the walls that held me, the lurching breaths pressing into me like fists, the too-much tossing around without rhythm or grace, the acid bite always in the blood. April: the month of the Deep Water Moon. As best I could, I refused. I turned myself around and got myself stuck, bottom first, a breach of too much understanding. My mother told me she remembered nothing about tne birth, but afterwards was the pain of too much tearing and the loss of too much blood. |