she asks me when I’m going to settle down.
I ask her:
how many times do you have to be born before it finally takes?
how many skins do you have to shed before you stop needing to scratch your layers away?
she says I’m just going through a phase, like I wax and wane in cold, celestial cycles, like I’m pitted and dead yet falsely glowing enough to inspire madness and religion--all you need for love--and I say:
if I am, I’m not a crescent, not the sharp sickle bodies of those young tough girls with a newness and blooming confidence that cuts; almost all of them in shadow. nor am I full, those complete glowing girls, rich and round and shining so much you want to act out that old cliché: take them with your mouth like silver coins just to taste the sting of metal on your tongue, bite them between your teeth to make sure they’re real; nothing that luminous can be real.
no, I’m gibbous, I say. assymetrial, unassociated with wonder, curving outward right now with my neck tilted backward, spine pressing into my stomach as if to fill me from the inside with the cold newmoon air plucking at my raised hairs and nerve endings like pulling legs off spiders, spreading the feeling through my digestive system; swallow, send it vibrating down my bloodstream web until I’m inked with pulsing shadows on both sides.
and I close my eyes and say: they say the moon has a dark side, but how can you say that when the moon never really has a bright side in the first place? it’s only a beggar-god, only pitted gray dust that steals whatever shine it can.
and she says I’m just too young and I say:
you say I’m just going through a phase, but what do you mean because we are all going through phases. no one is everything they are all at once; they’d explode. we have to take it in pieces. a full moon every night doesn’t make sense; it swells the tide, it floods the beaches until everything drowns
and she says: you just don’t get the point. you take everything too literally, and I say:
you know how they used to think pictures stole your soul? well, what if it was sort of like that. look back at every picture of you. every one is a different person. with every picture you gained or lost thoughts, gained or lost age, depending on what order you view them in. with every new thought, you are a new person.
you know that phrase people use when they make a decision, “I changed my mind?”
well, every decision, ergo, changes the composition of who you are. so maybe they had something right. taking a picture captures who you were in exactly that moment. it’s like we have as many souls as seconds, all ripe for documentation and capture.
maybe it’s like ovulation, like eggs, I say. each soul you have stays ripe in you; either you meet the right circumstances, and that soul is nourished and develops, or you don’t and cast it off with only a little ordinary, cyclical pain--every time you lose a friend, an opportunity. we’ve killed ourselves so many times. then there comes a point when you just stop. you stop changing, you stop being born, you stop losing souls and being reborn every month, and you slow down until you lose the last one you have.
that’s why marriage is bullshit, I say. at the moment of “I do” the two are joined, but that’s just for the moment. don’t tell me anyone’s naïve enough to believe people stay the same for decades; how many millions of souls pass through those two bodies in between those years, and how times do they have to pray to get lucky, how many pulls on the slot machine arm before the sevens line up again and they feel that connection like full moon silver sharp metal life on their tongues again? it’s tragedy; it’s the gambler’s problem: every small win pushes them to bet more until it’s too late and their pockets are empty.
and they used to say your last breath was your soul leaving the body, and maybe they had it half right; it’s the very last you you have to give giving up because you don’t need to be born anymore.
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