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By Root 584 0

bed for him night after night he stays in Vietnam Tu-Ha I stay in bed for days and days I don’t eat I drink the drinking of alone I piss in the bed I don’t move me urine and vodka and sad sad dead childless woman with her job and her house and her first book and her cat and her dog and her money no husband Tu-Ha. Year 10 we pretend. Year 10 we go back to Tahoe to try to remember pretend. Year 10 we drink on top of Harvey’s Casino we drink in the elevator we drink instead of fucking until we can’t see or hear or feel we drink even on the way to the airport in the cab we get to the airport I go to the ticket counter to go back to Oregon but I know I’m not going to get to go back to anything just Oregon I turn around with the tickets he’s asleep against the wall snoring like drunks do all our luggage around him like children we never had I leave the ticket in his drunk sleeping hand he’s pissed himself I can’t take care of this man. Year 10 he sleeps with one of our mutual students she emails me and tells me she is a good person she emails me and tells me he is a good person she emails me and tells me I am a good person they fuck and fuck I come home from work she is on the black leather couch passed out he is passed out on the floor. Year 10 you said you would love me until I died you said we would die together in love you said when I was 75 we’d laugh our saggy skinned laughs and drink to our old ass love you said it to me you did every year until you stopped saying it where are you where is the man who would love a woman like me there are no men if not you there never were any men for me not even a father I stop eating lose 25 pounds everyone says everyone says you look so beautiful. Like a movie actress. Isn’t she beautiful?

Am I beautiful?

Love is a lifedeath.

My Lover, Writing

I KIND OF DON’T WANT TO TELL YOU THIS.

I mean I was going to write this whole book not telling you. I left words out. On purpose. But I know why I was hiding words from you.

Ask me about my life as a sexualized, gendered body, and I can tell you tales. Endless stories of a woman who was me and is also all of us. Our bodies the flesh metaphor for all human experience. This. This happened to me. This is where I failed. Where I went blind. Where I opened my legs. Where I chewed off my hand. Where I tried to off myself, or offer myself up as useful, or deigned to ask for love, or ventured into pleasure or pain. Or just got drunk and fucked up. Again. Here are the scars. I am a swimmer. My shoulders are broad. My eyes, are blue.

Ask me about writing, well, that’s a fierce private. Writing, she is the fire of me. Where stories get born from that place where life and death happened in me. She carries me and will be the death of me.

So when I tell you this, a little bit it makes me want to bite you.

Really hard.

Some people say that words can’t “happen” to you. I say they can.

One of my last nights with Devin I got all hopped up on mushrooms and went for a walk by the train tracks. We lived next to the tracks in Eugene-in a neighborhood where you would find needles in the alley but also yuppies trying to buy and restore their way to better. I was supposed to be writing a dissertation. That night we sat down on the ground. We drank Chivas from a flask. Then a train slow rolled by, and I jumped up and chased it laughing, and then I hopped it. I have no idea why. I looked back at the image of husband getting smaller and smaller until I couldn’t see him. I loved that receding him. Maybe it was our last good night. The wind felt excellent. The motion of a self riding to nowhere for all she was worth took my breath away.

Of course somewhere around five minutes later I snapped out of it and thought AHHHH what am I doing and thought JUMP IDIOT and so I did, I jumped off, and military rolled through some ground gravel until I came to a scraped to shit stop, laughing and laughing the high of organics and free. I walked home. Devin was exactly where I’d left him, kind of passed out like a giant drunk Caucasian Buddha.

The night after my gravel roll