T: April 25th, 2013

The glue on an envelope.  Sweet, but sickly so.  And no one above age twelve uses the lick method unless they’re in a severe hurry, but the absolute worst is opening a birthday card that’s been so freshly moistened with saliva that the glue is still wet when you shove a finger or two inside an exposed pocket of unstuck paper to wheedle it open.  The glue sticks to your fingers afterward and hardens into a thin film during cake time and is forgotten about until dishwashing, when it slimes off for those first few seconds under the faucet stream.

Paper cuts on tongue.
Paper cuts anywhere.
T for tongue.

Moving on.

Inadequacy.  It’s unattractive on every face.  Not the best at anything, but not the worst.  No distinguishable success or failure.  I won a writing competition once or twice and sped through the DMV without much hassle, but that’s the extent of the legendarium.  (I made that word up - add two points on the roster, count ‘em twice so you don’t forget.)  But in adequacy only exists through comparison, and I’m so used to idolizing everything that looks my way that perhaps it’s just the way the world works.  Alone, I’m the Statue of Liberty, a proper noun that totes a perpetual torch on an island of her own.  With a boy (pick a boy, any boy, any friend, any lover, even male or female if you please), I carry the litter (though I’ll use the Turkish tahtırevan because it looks nicer, which I looked up just now because I had forgotten what such a vehicle was called in the first place and have no original knowledge of my own without the Internet at hand) alone, sweating and toiling and smiling and smiling for the person reclining, reveling in my love like an ice cube that never melts in the noonday sun.

Love isn’t work.  Love pours out of me like a wrung-out sponge; every love-word in my life dripping out to you.  Toss an “I love you” my way and I’ll send it back with a grappling hook, looking to climb to the tallest reach of adoration, only to throw myself off the cliff when you decide to dam the stream.  It will happen because I’m too much.  Rolling on the floor, beating my fists against the bed because I refuse to make a damned sound and let you win.  Screaming and screaming and vomiting and ripping the skin away from the bone when you finally say you’ve had enough  I drown in love, I exist in it.  A fish darting through a drop of maple syrup, clogging gills and burning throats.  It’s too good, it’s too good - I lose myself in every way.

The ampersand becomes my name.

Inadequacy.  I hate you and what you’ve done.  You give me someone with taste and opinions and an outline visible to the naked eye, who’s wordy and wise and himself, and I’m the indefinable.  I’m tracing paper - place me over his silhouette and I’ll conform to the shape.  I’m gray matter.  I’m envelope glue.  I’m disappointing and angry and sad.  And he doesn’t deserve that, nor does anyone else in his place.

I’m in love, what can I say.  Too in love to speak and ruin the perception he must have.  On paper, I am him, but in life, I’m unaware and young and passionless.  I’ve given up art for him: he says Life is Expression, and I’ve maintained Life is Love from the moment I realized being alone didn’t have to be an option.

He’s got everything, and I’ve had nothing from the start.  And instead of fixing it, I cry and complain to- you guessed it.

He feels and lives.  I imitate.

I can’t do much more than that.  I’m tied to a screen for information.

We love for different reasons.  We love differently.

I can’t go on.  I can’t.