Three Little Birds

Questions of Bonds

It was early morning on a Saturday. Mykel had to leave proceeding breakfast that morning to go sign the papers in order to gain the space with which to open his new tattoo shop.

Liz was up with the sun, already having a pot of coffee brewing when Mykel and I dragged our half-dead carcasses down the stairs.

Liz is and always has been a regular early riser, much to the opposite effect of her younger, though much bigger brother.

We enjoyed a jovial breakfast together that Liz had been preparing, being the early bird she is when we came downstairs that morning.

Things had been...I'm not quite sure really...restive and the unquiet anxiety that was building between Mykel and me was becoming insurmountable. While he laughed during breakfast, I saw the small glances he kept sending me. The pained look in his eyes.

The kiss we had shared several days before had...taken me for a ride. The way his lips felt, the way his hands felt when he held onto my hips...my heart still flutters at the thought...

But there was still so much he didn't know about me. So much I was too afraid to tell him. I couldn't stand seeing the look of disgust disfigure the beauty of his face. To see those honey-wheat colored eyes darken with enmity and virulence. After he and I went to bed that night, I lay awake for hours, feeling the peace of his arms around me. Wondering if this was what love really felt like.

I inhaled him, breathing in his pheromones, making me dizzy with infatuation and something a bit more, before every single feeling of peace and safety plunged, shattering in the darkened hole of my soul.

Do you really think you deserve this? Are you actually beginning to believe that you're worthy of love? That someone could love a disgusting little scab like you?

The voice was my mother's, hard and cold and unfeeling. Whispering in my ear as she had done so many times before.

You're nothing. Less than nothing. You amount to less than maggots on dog shit. Didn't I teach you anything? You'll never be more than a pathetic little whore.

Tears began to leak slowly from my eyes. I knew the words to be true. My own parents couldn't find love for me...not a single shred of human decency...neither had anyone else. The men...I was nothing but a paid for hole to fuck...sometimes just a hole to take...

I was nothing. At least that's what I thought. What I had been taught to think. I still battle, even now, in keeping that in the past tense. I was never nothing and not...I am nothing...Mykel is teaching me, but I still have yet to master that particular skill. Sometimes that voice comes hauntingly back, from the depths of my memory bank like a krakin waiting for a hapless victim. Every time it dissolves me into a blubbering mess. During those moments Mykel comes and gently sweeps up my broken pieces and glues them back together again.

What I have never told him is that sometimes I'm afraid one day there will not be any whole pieces left to put me back together again, simply fragments with too many holes to keep stable.

He did not wake to my cries that night as I began to mourn what I thought could never be.

Liz noticed the strain between us, the tension in my body at his presence, but kept silent, waiting patiently for the right moment to bring it up. That moment was that morning after Mykel left.

He stood from the breakfast table, his eyes sliding to me before quickly looking away again. I closed my eyes in a failed attempt to not catch the confusion, rejection, and sorrow that had been hovering around him the last few days. I didn't have to see it to feel it.