Britney

“Are you OK?” she says to my bare feet. I have walked from the house and across the lawn with them. I cannot speak well. I have woken up and seen a ghost that was meant to be rived. I am the accidental witness to a murder; I am the ill wife who overhears her husband’s private affairs from the stygian blackness of her chambers, too weak to hide when he comes in.

It’s like a game: two paths of chance. I lie. “I’m fine.”

I almost vomited from remembering on the Q train yesterday and it would have been good only to mail all the reactions to Julia Kristeva, fingering the fine line where sick corpse meets mortal eye and the great divide ceases to exist. All of that in an MTA car, on top of the unbuckling of the worst repressed memories I’ve had the pleasure of holding—I’d be an NYC legend.

I wake up choking on my sadness and I don’t protest because it is all my fault. I remember this no matter how hard I shut my eyes or widen them. When I first started going to the park and to school my mother told me what to do if a stranger tried to talk to me. She told me how to scream, where I got my banshee beginnings. She told me the tricks of the predator trade and how to run without stopping until I got home.

I did not eat the lessons well enough. I missed out on mastication. Now I am this. Too scared to complain. ♦