but I'd trade the rest of my days for you tonight

first sunburn of the year, slow to develop, just a little glow on my forearms and face. riding bikes by the lake with my lost friend's little sister and talking about loss and love and hurt and growing up.

my heart aches. there's so many holes punched in it that I imagine it like lace, gushing and leaking inside my chest. maybe that's why it's beating so fast. 85 bpm, unrelenting, like new love, like stage fright, like being chased down a darkened hallway in the night by the wolf from under the bed.

where is my brave face. where is the script for me to follow. what is love. can I love without trusting, or is that just addiction to oxytocin and dopamine and a very specific bioelectric field.

when I was little my mom used to make me pray for a husband. now I can't imagine anything other than living and dying alone. even when I'm with someone. when nobody's going anywhere. when they're right where I need them. I'm still alone, because there's no hope of anything other than loss and loneliness and broken shattered pieces of my lacy hole-filled heart. when did I lose faith.

who broke my heart first. my dad. jesus. the world. I remember being 13 and telling myself that there was no such thing as love. losing my virginity in a tent in the woods to a stranger, before ever even having a first kiss. because nothing is special. nothing is pure. nothing will last.

tomorrow I give in to the dark side. I lose the mission. I cease to keep the faith. I go to a psychiatrist and I get pills to quiet my heart. to put me to sleep. to make being unwanted hurt less. to keep my brave face on. to live through this.

everything sticks in my throat. pills. raisins. toast. resentment. fear. maybe I'm choking on love, on insecurity. on being unable to let go and trust. to surrender control.

I first heard this song the summer of 2003. the first time I lived alone. me and the cats and a sixpack of high life writing in livejournal, bike rides to the food coop, to decleyre, to the felix house. honeysuckle and porch swings and blue shadows on the street. sitting alone in the dark listening to lucero, loneliness like a knife embedded in my chest. surrounded by love but unable to open my arms and take it. like tantalus in hades. pushing the rock of my own stubborn lack of faith and hope and trust endlessly up this hill.

so I'll swallow my pills until summer, until the earth tilts, until things make more sense. until they are better.

but it won't be tonight.