For You

I hope you read this as much as I hope you don't, and I have no idea if you will or not.

I mean, you, you know the crazy things about me that I don't tell anyone, I don't even tell myself.  And yet you call me unreadable, a puzzle.  You brush my too-long hair away and call me beautiful and for the first time I almost believe it.  And so when you walk away, because you will walk away, know that I can't tell you and I don't know why.  The thing that I need to say- words, three of them, choking me into silence.  So put this down.  Put this down on the old coffee table stained with rings from our tea mugs.  Put this down and walk through the kitchen with it's mismatched dish towels and oversized cutlery.  Walk out through the door painted  a peeling blue and let the screen swing, bouncing shut behind you.  Out down the driveway and across the street to your car.  Maybe it won't start on the first or third or fifth try, it was always temperamental, but you will get it started and you will drive away and away and away.  

Some year, I know, you will be back.  A newer, shinier car that starts on the first try, and you will drive up, and down, and up again.  You will wonder if I still live in that crumbling piece-of-shit house, or if some other poor bohemian girl has inherited the low ceilings and slowly sinking foundation.  And it doesn't matter, because whoever is there is still me, somehow, because I am frozen at 23 and now you are the Successful Man you always dreaded.  Then you will nervously curse me and the whole rotten place, with it's disgusting lifestyle of nothingness and happiness.  But you see in the rearview as you drive away a ghost of a figure in need of a haircut; and you choke up and now you understand because you can't speak or breath.  You take a piece of paper or a bit of a cardboard box and you try to write because you can't say these things out loud but when you do it all seems so silly, so you throw it away.

I want you to know all this, but I can't tell you because you have to know on your own. And I wish that I could save you from the hurt or the pain but if I do, you will have lost something because of me.  I hate you for putting me here, I do but I can't help coming back because you are you.  So I hope you read this, but I also don't.