Insides Like Mine
Not that you give a fuck, but hello. It’s July and my toes are painted orange. I’m sat twenty-one storeys above a city fifteen hours away, thinking of car rides to nowhere in the dead of January.
You’d hate if I came cheap and sentimental — hello, old friend — like some kind of asshole. Because we’re not friends, not anymore. You taught me the cost of sentiment. Would you be surprised to know I never learned? My insides are soft and gooey. There’s no pretending otherwise. When someone guts me — as I let them, too often, too freely — they ooze. I sigh and count the steps to scrape them off the floor, to stuff them back inside.
It goes like this:
Slow down.
Stop.
Get it together.
Occasionally I write, too. What I keep inside will kill me, turn my guts rotten. But my guts have been rotten for years, you know this. Wonder that I even bother scraping ’em up anymore.
Your baby brother died some time ago. When I heard I knew without knowing. On the January drives you told me: Strung out. Stealing money. Screaming in the basement. The extremes of it, exhaled around Marlborough Lights. We grew up embarrassingly suburban and I believed he would get better. That the problem would resolve itself, like a six-episode television arc.
I didn’t reach out, after. Not because I didn’t care, or wasn’t sorry. The words got stuck. Weren’t good enough. My foolish belief that the right ones can tip a scale, tilt an axis, change a life.
I’m sorry for that, too.
Everything I feel is violent, breakneck. Nothing halfway. Last month I spilled my rotten guts to a man. Told him I loved him, cheap and sentimental, like some kind of asshole. I know, I know. After all our talk of upper hands. Of keeping them. Frozen rural roads, barren of light but for crescent moons or rippling belts of northern green. Crying over some fucking guy. You bent under the hood, checking the oil under an iPhone light.
“Listen,” you said. “I’m only gonna explain this once.”
One slender palm, open and straight. Like you might slap me. I wish someone would, these days.
“Cry all you fucking want,” you said. “But don’t you breathe a word about it.”
That was the difference. You knew the strength in silence. That the only words that could tilt or tip or change anything were ones that went unsaid. Balances of power. Biting your tongue. This is what you taught me.
But here I am.
Breaking silence all the same.
Last I heard you had a husband, a job at an aviation company. I could be wrong. You’re quiet on social. Outgrown it, maybe; you already know yourself. We took each other’s profile pictures on harbour rocks above ice that cracked like gunshots. Mean wind off the big lake. Kids tattoo its outline on their skin, etch STAY COLD along the shore. I liked the idea, but felt an imposter. Can I claim that cold — stake it in ink — with insides like mine?
Maybe life would be easier, if I could.
Hard to say.
About life — have you heard? I kicked the bucket from under mine. Left everyone who ever loved me, or claimed to. New name. New address. New eyes. My edges are harder to find without anyone to toe them. I don’t know who I am, not really. I build and break myself on little bitty hearts from strangers. Observe, adjust, slap my own wrist. You never know who’s watching.
Nothing constant about me but the crying.
They’d never know it, though.
I don’t breathe a word.
Twenty-one storeys high, thinking of your brother in that basement. Maybe I understand him better. How extreme the feeling. How impossible to bear. How urgent our need to obliterate it.
We didn’t know that, then. That’s what I wanted to tell you. We craved the extremes, chased them between booze and bars and bedsheets, down frozen roads in your beaten silver Civic. Carving our edges in the January dark. We thought extremes lived outside us; that they disappear once we slow down, or stop, or get it together. But they don’t. They’re just buried, violent and breakneck. Begging to be spilled.
Something tells me you already know. You learned everything long before I did.
This is me, losing the upper hand. Finally saying hello. If you breathe it back, I’ll be here.
Scraping up what’s left.
Stuffing it back inside.
Loving it best I know how.
Kirsti MacKenzie has published in HAD, Bear Creek Gazette, Identity Theory, and Rejection Letters. She studied creative writing at Humber College and Memorial University but learned the most from bathroom graffiti in dive bars. She lives in Ottawa and can be found perpetually on her bullshit @KeersteeMack.
