The World Is Too Full to Talk About
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Philophobia: Strangers are easy <strong>to</strong> look at, loved ones are<br />
museums of brutality.<br />
I’ve tried very hard <strong>to</strong> exit the room my body is held in. My mother<br />
and father owned my body, it was a symbol of shame. My school<br />
owned my body, it was a fertile landscape in which catastrophe could<br />
grow, my boyfriend owned my body, he owned it secretly, owned it in<br />
allies, in small rooms, at unexpected moments, it was something <strong>to</strong><br />
bend and poke, elastic deadness that stretches <strong>to</strong> fit a need.<br />
I tried very hard <strong>to</strong> secure a room of my own, a room of one’s own like<br />
Virginia said, <strong>to</strong> have space for my body <strong>to</strong> be animal and solitary and<br />
safe, <strong>to</strong> shed the concealing plastic off my skin, which tugs and mends<br />
in<strong>to</strong> a better, shinier shape, <strong>to</strong> let my body be oxidized and rot as all<br />
living, striving human flesh.<br />
If I could own my life would my bones s<strong>to</strong>p collapsing un<strong>to</strong> me? Like<br />
a building crumbling down daily with me walking aimlessly inside it.<br />
If I decide <strong>to</strong> own<br />
My life I will kill off all the surrounding love, it is the only way. Being<br />
loved is a symbiotic relationship in which two animals rot in the same<br />
room.<br />
Daily I gather objects of memory and build a fortress, books,<br />
notebooks, a business card, a dried flower. Scents of home <strong>to</strong> carry<br />
through the industrialized cemetery, where young bodies purge and<br />
holler for joys and forgetting, I could pull out my brother’s business<br />
card, he is growth and health- always it feels as if I’ve lost someone<br />
with whom life was less desolate, like a limb or a spouse of 15 years.<br />
But it is alright, and if <strong>to</strong>day I am ugly and find no love it is alright, the<br />
hills are alive with the sound of music.<br />
All day a dull compulsion <strong>to</strong> be loved makes it’s self known, seeps in<strong>to</strong><br />
the half conscious desperate dreams of 10 minute naps on buses, a love<br />
that is an anesthesia, a burst of scent in the grey nowhere, muscles on<br />
bones, a way <strong>to</strong> move and connect. It is difficult <strong>to</strong> imagine someone<br />
loving me if I am not even a full person with beginnings and ends, how<br />
could one love scattered a<strong>to</strong>ms? How could one love me if half of my<br />
nerves are fried in<strong>to</strong> oblivion? To be loved is a kind of horrid answer <strong>to</strong><br />
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