You have left no footprints here.

Many shoes have scuffed these gleaming hallways dull,
Gauche and mudcaked, large and echoing and
Careless.
Many hands have scrawled initials on these walls, invasive.
Gouged ownership into wooden panels with small, coarse blades
Pulled from pockets.

It is true that dust has lain in drifts
In silence
On every surface of my heart
For so long that the wings of a trapped moth could create
Snow angels and murmuring hieroglyphs along the window ledge,
The lightest sigh kick up a sandstorm on any landing,
The flickering of a single candleflame expel eddies of powdery currents to settle in concentric ripples, like the whispering chiffon skirts of a ballerina crumpling to curtsy.

It is true, as well, that every morning I fling wide the doors
And let the light in,
But light has no fingers, no arms or heartbeat,
No
Breath,
And when it fades
Leaves not a trace.

Evidence of past trespassers lies strewn,
Enshrined in a large, beautiful mausoleum with sparkling windows and
Total silence.
I took your hand and led you down each hallway,
Showed you the aging murals and
The haunted rooms--
Places where shutters slam of their own accord
And faces besides one's own inhabit mirrors--
Waltzed with you in the grand, shrouded foyer,
Sang to you sitting on the eaves in the starlight
But never once
Did I leave you to your own devices.

Not an heirloom did I let you leave your fingerprints upon,
And wherever I led you
Not a breath stirred--
The solid, blue stillness remained,
A former time trapped in glass
Catching and releasing tricks of light to mimic movement,
And only I spoke, only I sang, only I
Waltzed.
Only my footfalls echoed
And only my shadow soared,
For as long as I touched you
You could never touch
Me;
Paper thin, a refraction from the other side
A ring of crystal whose echo would ****** into
That inevitable quiet, so rich and heavy
Like the dust adorned velvet drapes I draw
Each night and peel back at daybreak.

Like a forest preserved,
Only light enters here
And only images leave.
The beaten paths have been
Abused
But only those who made them may change any:
The rest are only visitors, who take nothing but breaths
And leave nothing but silence,
Who **** nothing but time
Although they may hurl stones
And stir up no dust whatsoever,
Regardless of their flailing passions.

Many loves have scarred this heart,
Burnt names in lists
Into the railings and stair treads so that I may touch nothing without feeling the remembered heat.
Many souls have lit this hall with sacred gold
And bounced their laughter off the beams.

But your name
When spoken
Fell like a shadow on the floor,
Grasping feebly at a few dreamy dust motes illuminated by an errant shaft of sunlight
Before fluttering into silence.
Many names make this heart
A temple and a
Tomb
But yours
Is not among their number--

Another day is ended,
Another sun is set,
And you
Have left no footprints here.

This is my body.
I am
Skin and bones.
Flesh and sin.
I am doing my best.
And I am finally learning that
If I am not good enough for you
Or you
Or you
It is not my problem to become good.
I am what I am.
I am this story and its pale slipcover
Covered with words that my skin drinks in.
Ink is toxic
But love burns more,
And I am starting to know the unsettling truth that has been hiding
In my marrow for years:
I am no addict.
I am afraid,
But I am not dependent.
I need nothing but these feet to kiss the ground
And this heart to love the world.
The faces I've chosen to worship
Are starting to blend and meld.
The universe is beginning to have its own visage
In every person I meet,
And suddenly they can all mean anything
And none of them
Can mean everything.
And that is a loss, yes, it's a loss of faith
Of a stubborn longing I have served for years
That one set of eyes may outshine the others.
But the truth is that anything holy that I have ever touched
I have made so with my fingertips.
Anyone lovely I have ever adored
I have painted with my heart.
We are alone again,
Me and my bone-white sheath,
And we look forward.
Today somebody told me that no love is worth it
If it ever hurts you.
What a concept, what a dream- it stopped me dead.
A person whose touch brought no pain?
And I thought on the possibility for a moment,
And realized that the only people who could ever hope to give and get no pain in love
Are those who dwell beneath gravestones in the silent fields
And never touch at all.
Bravery is stepping forward into a brutal world
Knowing that it WILL change you
That it will mar you
That it will
Eventually
Claim you
And stepping forward anyhow.
Here I am in my moonlight skin, soft and delicate and easily punched through
Like a paper lantern
But what have I to fear
When the only thing I know about this world
Is that it will **** me someday?
The only thing I can be certain of is that I will lose all of this,
And so I am free to enjoy it as I please,
Knowing that I suffer no punishment
Only inevitability
Only
Nature.
I step on.
I surge on.
I have learned in these weeks
How to stand before the world
My naked soul
Shining in the sun
And be unashamed of my fragility.
I have learned and it has seeped inside of me
And I have cast off a veil I have clung to like death
A shroud I've hidden beneath
And for the first time in a long time
I stand, unconcealed.
This is my body.
And I am
Undaunted.

I'm too nice. It makes you feel bad. It makes you feel mean. It makes you uncomfortable, being silent when I reach out.
Reasons to leave.
I'm too attentive. You can always be sure I'll try my hardest for you. Buy you little things. Bring flowers. It's boring. You know it shouldn't be but somehow it's just too predictable. Somehow you wish you wondered if I'd stay, and every day I reassure you that I will.
Reasons to leave.
I'm too in love. My love for you makes you feel guilty, as if you can never match it. My sensitivity to your desires makes me sensitive to your dissatisfactions, and although you know it shouldn't, it irritates you that you can hurt me. It makes you feel uncomfortably inadequate again. You remind yourself that love is not a contest between lovers to be the most devoted, nor to be the least injured, and so you've neither lost nor won, but still you have a sense of both, an unsettling sense of both.
Reasons to leave.
Your discomfort leads you to anger. You lash out, ashamed even as you do, and my forgiveness enrages you. You want me to hate you. Want me to react as you would if you were abused. Wish you weren't the abuser. Wonder how you became so. Hate me for bringing it out in you, for before you met my soft, pliant love, my understanding heart, my forgiving mind, you never wanted to strike anything lovely with the flat of your hand to watch the welt rise, a satisfying flaw.
Reasons to leave.
Who are you becoming? Who have you become? It can't be you who is wrong, not when you've only been reacting. I've laid myself down. That must be it. I have goaded and invited you. I've tricked you into hurting me and then shed tears as if I didn't know it'd sting, and yet I refuse to fight you. It must be because I can't. If I could, it would mean that you were attacking someone who meant you no harm, only love, only LOVE! No, no it must be that I have no fangs of my own, only guises. It must be that the only way I can hurt you is to lower you, to make you hurt me and then feel the guilt of it, to turn you against yourself. I have engineered this. You won't be tricked by me! You will keep on until I admit I planned to control you.
Reasons to leave.
It has been too long. Something is amiss. By your estimations, I should have folded by now- confessed that I was never nice, only weak. Repented. Explained that I tempted your cruelty in order to make you loathe yourself. Apologized. Begged. But it has been too long, and I am still forgiving, I am still hurt but not vicious. You decide I need to understand I've done wrong. Apologize, you say.
Reasons to leave.
I do. I am sorry. And you find that the sorrier I am, the angrier you are. The more I tell you you are right, the more you want me to tell you you're wrong. To fight. To be cruel. Untoward. Wrong. You want me to fight so that I will prove I am like you, show my colors. After all, I made you this way. I must be as you are to have brought such venom out in you with such skill. I apologize again. I beg. And you find that the begging makes you want to hurt me, sink a knife between my ribs to watch me squirm the way you're squirming, spitted on the notion that perhaps, just maybe, I was never cunning or sneaky, never manipulative, never trying to take you down... The growing, sickening feeling that maybe I was telling the truth, maybe I loved you, love you. Maybe I really just wanted to bring you flowers.
Reasons to leave.
And now you can't look at me. You wish beyond anything you have ever wished before that you still believed me underhanded. But the part of you that respects me is growing, that understands me, and with it grows a horror that you have acted on a false certainty. And now even as you realize that, you realize that if you apologize, I will forgive you. And if I forgive you, you will hate me for it. And if you hate me for it, you will no longer have any excuse outside the boundaries of yourself. If you hate me for it this time, it will be from a dark, ugly thing inside you. Something you will have to be responsible for.
Reasons to leave.
Because if you never acknowledge it, never apologize, I can never forgive you truly, right? And if I can't, then you can't hate me, and you can't have been so wrong. And so you don't. And for a while it seems to work. But then you realize that somehow, I am not holding you responsible for your cruelties. Nobody is. You've not acknowledged them, and I've found some infuriating way to ignore them and love you past them. And you realize it's not fair. You need it to be fair. It's maddening. It makes no sense.
Reasons to leave.
And now you understand that there is only one way to escape the torture of being forgiven for something awful that you never even apologized for, having sidestepped so many imaginary snares that you've tangled yourself up in your own assumptions and insecurities.
And so
You leave.

Sometimes at night when I turn over and my hand slides along the small of your back
I can feel the changes beneath your skin.
Sitting next to you, I read you like braille
Like something you need to touch to feel the meaning of.
I know you are a storm beneath your skin.
Sometimes I feel lightning reach out
To the answering chaos in me.
Our suffering makes our togetherness
Electric.
Cataclysmic.
We could crumble mountains.
I don't know if you know your own wildness inside,
Wilderness.
I think inside you are vast and lonely, wonderful but vaguely sad,
The way the trees sound when a breeze sighs its way through them and makes them sway.

Sometimes I feel a coldness from you like a chilly night without a fire
The kind of cold that starlight and silence bring-
Not a hostile chill, like the sharp fingers of frost or ice,
But just a distant kind of... Containment.
A solitude, like the desire to curl into the rocks by the river and become one by touch.
A desire to be still.
It scares me. I don't know how to reach that part of you.

Sometimes I look at you and I see storm clouds and wildfires in your eyes,
I see the end of days, and earthquakes, and brutal hurricanes,
But I see them through glass, as if you've stepped inside a mirror and imprisoned your rambling hurt to keep the world safe-
I see it through the cracks in a briar wall that's sprung up suddenly and sharply, tangled and complex, a warning.
And although I don't want to be
I am warned.

I want to touch
But I am so very good with boundaries
So very
Sensitive.
I feel the changes in the air
The way a deer in the forest may shoot its head up at the scent of a hunter miles away, caught on an errant breeze.
You change what I breathe in and out,
You change my weight and my texture.
Sometimes from you I can close my eyes and feel what warm honey must feel like in essence-
If sunlight found purchase in the air.
I feel fields of wildflowers and slow, dreamy, balmy nights and days at the seashore with diamonds capping the waves.
Sometimes I feel from you the tickle of cut grass, and the smell of fresh rain, and what a butterfly's furry wings would feel like if stroking them wouldn't make them crumble like spun sugar.
Sometimes I feel from you the slow, deep pull that I remember from sitting at the bottom of that coral reef in St Thomas-
The heat of the day sinking in layers through the water to hold me suspended in graceful pressure-
Poised to be swallowed by something much more significant and much hungrier than me.
And sometimes there is simply cold, the way I said,
As if the wind has somehow changed and left me adrift, sails dead, in a sea that offers no sustenence and no explanations.
In those times of stillness I wait, breathless,
Cautious-
They always pass,
So far.

I sit beside you and hold my breath
Hold my hands.
I sit and look at the grass
At the sky
But I see you instead
Silent beside me,
An unknown, a mirror maze
All of a sudden sunlight
And all of a sudden shadows.

When you go dark and silent I want to start digging.
I want to sink to my knees and pull apart the earth,
Find its heart, hot and sticky and molten,
Burning with the secrets of a forever life in the belly of a fragile stone.
I want to claw it out and put your hands on it,
Watch it feed your soul and sear away that terrifying cold.
Light you up so that you will never curl up silent around a black glass starless hailstorm ever again.
I feel the dirt under my fingernails and how
Odd it is
That it is familiar, from scrabbling out of grave after grave,
Confused and reborn and shivering.
How odd that now I am tunneling towards what remade me so many times
To try to break the laws of nature and bring it to you
Before you ever have to sink towards it.

But I feel from you. And then I don't. And then I do.
And it wakes in me an unsettled longing more powerful than my history.

I feel from you the silence right after the last note of a symphony fades
Before the audience applauds
Before anyone has even taken a breath.
I feel that exquisite beauty
And the fear that it will shatter.
(The fear that is the knowledge that it will shatter.)
I feel all of this from you
For you and
I think it might be
Love.

Please love me, although I have loved before.
Please know that even if
I have worshiped foreign hands,
Marveled at constellation eyes,
Shed tears for other minds and hearts
That tore from me some brutal, awesome love,
Know that nobody has ever made me feel safe
For any measurable length of time.
That not one of them ever stopped in the midst of kissing me to say
"You are just so beautiful."
The way you did, Lover,
2
3
4 times,
Just yesterday.
That all the flowers I ever gave them,
All the gifts and poems and artwork
All those things to show my love
Were tolerated
The way the sun is tolerated on a blistering summer day
Because to escape from it would be too difficult.
Know that I always knew that,
Felt it from them,
Felt shame for it.
And no matter how many photographs I have obsessively taken
Of a face I thought they must have molded the face of the sun after in every ancient carving,
Know that she never wanted me to see her.
And that that
COUNTS.
You looking up at me from those white sheets, Lover,
And never glancing away in embarrassment or apprehension
Counts:
Skin
Counts
To someone who has been held at arm's length for so many years.
Kisses count,
And I count them, every single one soothing the ache of the losses I never asked
To suffer.
It is true, you are not my first love.
But never have you pushed me away.
Never have you shut me down,
Never
Have you been cruel to me.
And all this
I find it counts
More than the awe I felt for those who would abuse me,
More than the fear and loss and devotion and destruction that they demanded
And then blamed me for the consequences of.
Although I have loved before,
Please, please, please love me now,
For that is something you can be
First at,
Lover.

Every man
I have ever
Loved
Admired
Or even
Respected
Has in some way degraded me
Unforgivably.
This is why I prefer to meet them in passing,
As shadows with hard fingers and
Leers
Or as ghosts with an extra tip
For the pretty waitress.
I cannot love
Admire
Or even
Respect them
If I really see their faces.
So I don't
Look.

I am
Eve.
It is my task
To sample the fruit,
To romance the serpent,
To
Fall.
It is my task
To corrupt.

I am
Eve.
It is my duty to be pure.
My burden
Is skin
Is shame
Is
Pleasure.
It is my charge
To be a symbol,
To be a statue--
Smooth, perfect marble
Cold and unmoldable.

But
My flesh
Gives
Under fingers.
My smoothness
Has heat.
Has breath.
Has
Blood.

I am
Eve.
It is my calling
To be a paradigm.
Still and quiet as a
Painting or mural
Which can be pointed to
And admired.
It is my role.
I am something
To aspire to.
Something to acquire.
Something to
Protect.

I am
Eve.
It is my destiny
To disappoint.
It is my fate
To fail.
It is my study
To ******.

I have been to trial
By power.
It is my crime
To burn the garden.
It is my obligation
To be
Deceived.

I am Eve.
And I am
Unprepared.