the habit of being

I am cold in my house, and I wish to put that line in italics because it has so much meaning. I am cold in my house.

(In my house, in my room, in my space, in my skin, in my cells I am ice and a vanilla bean speck, a nucleus which has died somehow, or even a star. My compassion is endless, while my warmth runs negative.)

“Why do I have to be here this summer?”
“Because this is where you live.”
“Because this is where I live?… I live in my head.”
“Well, I guess we all do… To a certain extent.”

I was crying, my head against her side, on the dirty tan blanket she read under. I had been crying all day, and it took all the courage I could invoke to climb those stairs, dragging my heavy eyes to look at her, my mother, now so foreign from my binary perspective; I was so afraid. She didn’t know what to tell me, and I just wanted to say “you still love me, don’t you?” (Question Number One: Can a mother love a daughter who gets fucked on the floor of some generic Hampton Inn hotel room and tells her she was at Media Play until 1 am the same way she loves a daughter who wins the English department award and National Merit Scholarships and studies biology diligently for hours and hours?) but instead I said I needed a hug and that I would be so miserable. And she was still, in a daze, so like me, and I felt I was killing her, and went back downstairs.

I sat down again on my own bed and he walked up to me, comfortable, familiar, warm; he stood there and held my head against him as I cried and cried and cried. He stroked my hair and I sobbed, and it had been that way forever, and I said again and again that I didn’t know, and he said he needed his keys, and finally I gave them to him.

And he left. And I kept crying.

(Eventually, I stopped. And I remember telling my thoughts in words and my feelings in touch and kisses and screams, and knowing, without doubt, that another WHOLE PERSON really exists in this white thin world of paper Katharineperceptions stapled together so roughly and unprecisely and slightly torn. Being overcome, so happy it cannot be thought of, so real and so alive, so very much myself, pressed against a wall, in the shower or in the rain, so grateful. Realizing, for the first time, what it really means to love someone else more than myself, and how the tears kept flowing, and my body became nothing but an extension of my emotion, and I could never see myself as anything but beautiful, and so much a girl, and so much in love.)