A road between two.

I remember how much I used to think about you. In the town where I was young, a winding road between two swamps. Each time the weight of the vehicle pushed to the right and I asked and received the most delightful visions of you in my head. You smiled at me as you reached for my hand. When our fingers interlocked I would tell you,

"I want to be good,"

You would smile and disappear as quickly as you touched me. Now I am anxious for that memory. Someone has tough callused hands around my ankle. A bag is over my head. Nothing is visible and I am so scared of what is about to happen. Who used to pull on my ankles? A teacher once did that with such love, I assumed she was my wife, if I ever knew what a wife was.

These hands are different, they do not like me, they want to hurt me. Other pairs exist in this room. I understand why they want to do this, it makes sense, it doesn't mean that I do not want to run away. The sock shoved in my mouth is making my jaw ache. Bitter fetid tears are falling from my eyes and my nose can smell the iron of my blood mixing in between the muffled sobs.

Ushered and placed in a chair, leather straps go around my forearm. The hat is pulled from my head and I am staring into eyes that see this everyday. I sputter as they rip the tape and then pull the sock out. No words come out, as I make a face, trying to feign confidence. There was that road. Where was that road? Does anyone know the way to go home? What happens when they do this to us? Crying, I bow my head and I feel the initial pressure of the clamp on my pointer finger. The tear is so shocking, like the north sea on family vacations, feeling like I should smile, instead I say,

"Forgive me, Forgive me, FORgive me, FORgive ME,"

A piece of paper has words written on it. Words were meant to be read, but read aloud? I do what they say, it sounds as foreign as Mandarin but I am speaking my native tongue. How many people are going through the same exact moment right now? How many would try and reach back to the time they were young and they felt the soft skin and all the impending mistakes of being on this world for two decades. Remember the sharkskin paper of books being carried to be a productive member of what? A club? A lie? A reason to hate, no one to say good morning to.

As my head is bowed, like Mishima on the day of his reckoning, except I have no one who loves me. People will never be given the grisly, instead a rehashed story that grown ups tell other grown ups when they can't face their own conscience. Granted no last meal, I cannot see the road between the two swamps and I know why.

We have a choice, even if it isn't between life and death.

The Man with no Muscles

I do not use a single muscle in my body. Suffering from hypersensitivity, everything makes me upset, my heart pounds when I see a commercial that indicates the slightest trace of human emotion. Before my father would let in to me, he told me this was called the weak disease. The only way to end it, was to force it out, with fists, belts, suspenders, baseball bats, cheap beer bottles, and once my mother's shoe. My mother had the weak disease too. Every night while I suffered from my affliction, My father, the self proclaimed medicine man, would pummel her till her cries became as silent as the day the door closed and my mother disappeared forever. 

My mother must have been rehabilitated. I had to stay, until my father told me it was okay. Red liquid, the toxins of my body would pour from every orifice as he left me to sit in the living room. After all, even doctors need their rest. Psychotherapy was also important. I had mantras to live by:

I am pathetic. I am a weak minded. I deserve everything that happens to me. How can I be strong? How can I be better? I will change. I will change.

I needed to be bigger. The local swimming pool was usually off limits, but submission, I was slowly learning was unacceptable. I jumped in the pool. I thrashed my body, how could my soft bones and peach weak skin move from one side to the other. Once before this, I had been in water, an ocean filled with needles, people and their friends laughing at me, as I swallowed brackish water, pretending not to notice that I was sobbing, waiting for someone to help me. No one did, for they knew to touch the untouchable will be a gravely ill mistake. I wandered around exhausted until wrapping my arms around the pole of an abandoned harbor, looking at metal and steel. The ocean butterfly out of the chrysalis and into a hot hurting city of immeasurable pain.

I have six lanes to my lonesome. I pulse and swim, a new part of me awakens, and the kaleidoscope of colors are bursting at me. Sucking the water, the bromine fills out until my lungs are soggy. I drain the pool and hold the water, a massive tank of urine, bacteria killing, and lost goggles. Heaving and sagging down the streets, an orb, the boy with no muscles, the child with no heart, the beat that sags to silence. He waits for me in his chair. The weak disease is gone, instead of beating it out of me, I fill it up in one balloon and wait for it to pop. His eyes cannot mask the surprise he has for me, the maw of being victim and victor. Spilling his warm beer he stifles back and prepares, but nothing can prepare anyone for a flood. No higher ground, we live on the top floor. 

Spewing forth, my teeth rip from my guns, The water that has mixed with my stomach acids fly in his directions pushing his back against the wall. Sacrum, Lumbar, Thoracic, Cervical, all slowly being pulled North, South, East, and West. His eyes bulge and he is torn limb from limb. When it is all over, I go into my room. Soaking wet and cold. Shivering I find the beautiful cardboard wings my mother gave me as a child. If she has gone anywhere, I know it is up, into a sky where things are better, where love exists an I won't cry anymore.

On the roof, I hear noises, that ever present heat begin to itch at my skin, perhaps a relapse? Perhaps not. I walk to the edge and I fly so high, but first I must swim. The girt, the water, but finally I use my muscles. It hurts but I am not weak anymore.