heartburn expulsion

lazy susan

every single banner you sprouted from your spine, you waved proudly for all to see. these fabrics, marinated for years in your broiling brown blood, stinking with piss, each erected tall from strong roots under your skin, a canopy forest of red shimmying in the wind from your bare back. you would pop your shoulder blades and they'd flip out, springing out as uncoiled porcupine spikes. black blood was spilled on these flags, brushed on in thick, sloping splatters as a dirty vandal would, spelling out your own crimes.

these were the signs that i sought from God, and i didn't heed them.

i did think about them every night though. how could i not? i prayed for the signs, asking God to reveal them to me "very clearly and audibly so i will know straightaway whether he is the one". and there they were, pushed out of your skin and fluttering in my face. i looked at all these flags and wondered where the roots lay. who planted them? i knew systemic problems you were a part of were your own- the casual racism, the joking misogyny, the stubborn blindness to the patriarchy, turning the disabled into mocking insults against your friends. that was fine. (it was not, but i had a whole lie spinning for myself, you see.) that, i knew, i couldn't fix, even if i crawled into your skin and changed your heart with a wrench. but i thought i could educate- and that was my fallacy, for a true fool does not want to learn, but fight against what was right. these arguments turned my own heart against me. (i did not realise that you had a phantom hold of my heart.) somehow, i became touchy and sensitive and litigious, itching to pick at your faults when you just weren't smart enough as me to understand such issues. apparently by my own doing, i struck a chasm between us by growing to be more mature than you, leaving you behind, defenceless in your childlike, uninformed innocence. "i guess i'm just too immature to understand. there's a gap that i can't fix," you whined. "you can fix it by learning to understand. i'll help you," i said, extending my hand over the valley stamped wide across what used to be a plain. you looked at my hand, then left me on read.

there were other signs too, the foundations i were not so sure about. who laid them? i didn't know if it was my fault if your interest in me declined over the months. i thought i bored you, not intimating that i wanted to go out enough, always settling for movie-watching on either one of our sofas. i thought that, because i didn't put in enough effort to learn the same video games as you, or for always asking why you didn't say "i love you" back all the time to me, that your love was tidal, pushed and pulled by my waning actions . you had to be irritated. or tired. or uncomfortable in my comfortable stasis, our homely little bubble we built. all i wanted was just to be enveloped in your bubble-wrap love. i just forgot that plastic insulates and overheats, and you were always shifty and sweaty, especially in stagnant sleep.

so, you flipped the script, tore lines with teeth and spat them onto my skin. you took the flagpoles, one in each meaty hand at a time, and drilled them into my stomach.

i bore the weight of everything you did. everything and more. i couldn't slouch under it all, though, i had to grit my teeth and untwist my stomach and rise up, stand tall over you and let the grey, muddy porridge slime all over my torso. gravity pulled the drips into taut lines down into the earth, my tethers, hooked on my fingers. but the earth didn't open up and swallow me whole, to hide me from the shame. the earth didn't jostle loose into quicksand to sift me down under. no, i stood guilty. you ran away, free.