9-10

My eyes have been dry for a while now.

Harsh and itchy, but dry. I feel him there in the pit of my stomach, but I push him aside. Walk it off. If it's not bleeding it's not broken. I smother him with Kobe beef and Pellegrino and vodka, the food of rich folks pretending to be good ol' boys. Typical Americans. It feels good to take joy in food again. I am a person who takes joy in the senses.

The sun is warm but not overwhelming, and people with more money than me swing clubs on manicured grass. She and I drive through trees and open fields where people have paid to lean on their knees and size up their surroundings, and I mourn land I would have wandered happily for free.

Wind whips my white and red hair into my face and I smile my true smile, teeth I am ashamed of, crooked and wide, because no one can see and no one will care that my smile is odd and it is nice to feel the breeze and the sun, and as we take corners I slide to the edge of the cart and almost lose my balance but I don't steady myself because a strange part of me wonders what will happen if I fall.

I am the girl with white and pink and red hair now and she is the kind of girl who would fall just to see what happens.

She tells me a dream and I remember that she was in mine, and I flush with vodka and clementine soda and I tell her how in my dream I lay on her lap and she stroked my hair. I expect her to laugh, to be uncomfortable, but she understands and she is flattered. A little glass shard of me warms within, to be understood and accepted for all my strangeness, without question. To understand that I am not a person who knows how to ask for love and affection. Who knows that she should, sometimes, but does not speak the words.

I think about the last time I was touched but the memories are all tainted now. We have lain him out, the timeline, the final excuses I made for him ruined. The touches I thought were meaningful. How can people do that to another? I am not a person who touches, who asks for love. It defies my comprehension that this selfish boy man could lay on my lap and feel so genuine, could run his hands through my hair and make goosebumps on my arms and I felt love in his touch but it was not love. What was it? I can't separate these things anymore. They've gone past explaining. I am accepting that I will never understand, that I will never know what was real, or why, or how he could fake love in his touch when he could fake so little else.

We swerve around a corner and I let his memories fall onto the cut grass. I have nothing to show for this but a wasted year, so many tears and anxiety and screaming and losing my mind, and I thought, I thought, it was in a fight for love, but now I know it was nothing. I let myself be ruined for nothing, and that is the hardest truth to accept.

She laughs and I touch her back briefly. It's a motion that feels strange to me, to reach out. I feel silly and awkward, but she only smiles. I know that the people in my life who accept me and know me and understand that I am not mad and angry and wild, I am a warm soft center and a sharp mouth and a quick mind and a loyal, loyal heart, those people will let me reach for them. They will reach for me. I am warm as the sun, I am flushed now with excitement and happiness not shame. I bubble with a laugh, and it expels him from my system.