Every day when I was five
I asked my mother if it was my birthday,
and just when I began to believe I was
the only person who had never been born
I came downstairs to her holding
a single balloon in her hand. I do not remember
the color of it, or what her face looked like,
or what she had said if anything at all, but I remember
thinking that I knew something more about the world—
there had been a time before me, and then
I had, inadvertently, begun. And now a balloon,
made both invisible and permanent by memory
could mean everything, and descending those stairs
that opened onto a day uniquely my own, descending was still
an action like any other, and meant back then
an entrance into something open and full of light
like the kitchen of our old house in the morning, like
the front door, and not an unwilling return
into some dark and flooded basement
of the heart, my heart, which I believed
years later was my real home.
And when I lived there, by which I mean in the flood
I lay belly up, waiting for whoever it was
to be finished fucking me, I would feel humiliated
not by however my body was being used
but if, at the end, he would pay for my cab home;
home being loosely defined, in those days,
as a place away from men who I hoped,
being older, would be more dangerous
and maybe kill me or something and then I could leave
the world the same way I entered it: with all the mercy
of having no choice. Though in the end
all that age meant was that
they looked weary in lamplight and it almost seemed
I was offering them whatever little mercy
I had left in me instead. But please don't get me wrong.
It wasn't always like this: though I don't remember
what we talked about, ever, or how we came to meet,
a boy comes to mind, sometimes,
who drove me across the Verrazzano-Narrows
Bridge on accident, when we were trying to go
nowhere, not Staten Island,
and immediately turning back around
paid the toll twice, while I sat in the passenger's seat
and laughed until I cried, and though when I left him
that year, going home for the summer, I told all my friends
It's not like we're gonna get married, or anything,
I still told all of them, the story coming out of me
involuntarily, as though it could demand, somehow,
to be born. And even if, after I came back,
I didn't call him and we never spoke again,
I at least know why I didn't: because at that point
what had gone between us I could not afford
to ruin. Like when my mother once,
sometime between that boy
and my year of no birthdays,
when I knew something would soon go wrong
inside me and still wanted then to try
to fix it—suggested, outside the psychiatrist's office,
not looking at me, that we die,
right then, together. And I thought of how
every night when I was five
she would silently kneel in front of me
on the bathroom floor, brushing my teeth,
holding my mouth open, carefully, with one hand.
this is achingly beautiful
I love the journey this took me on