WHAT IF YOU'RE EASY TO LOVE

July, baby, July. Sizzling terraces, neck breathing, open clavicles, velvet everything. You already know what that means: I look at you, eyes wide and anticipatory like an open invitation. The candlelight pours into your gaze and reflects back onto my skin. It almost burns, the laser precision. Sinking into the chair like a bar prisoner and counting down your souvenir stories, I know whatever travels all the way up into my throat from the pit in my stomach when I’ve stopped myself from saying too much is not a good thing nor a scary thing. It’s just something that happens when I’m too raw and open to explain. The waiter keeps looking over. Do women have better peripheral vision?

But be right. Do right. Keep your legs crossed. Behave. It started at age five, tantrums in a grocery store. You were a needy child once. The Marie Antoinette intermission has served you well up until this point. Drag it up and down and beneath, this identity of turmoil I’m so unmistakably loyal to. Always just on the verge of irreversible madness. Wildness used to be punishable by kitchen algebra and treading through law, self-silenced first aid and emotional repression made possible by running away. And now you’re listening, and I’m talking, talking, talking, hardly stopping, can’t stop, more theories, more overflowing. Just how much is too much? I’d like to tell you everything I don’t know yet. I’ll be your hungover news reporter or a bleach blonde weather forecaster. I was going to flee again, but my legs are cotton and I’m screwed.

The thing about me is that I’ve always felt off. Made disposable by the burden of my own complexity. The kind that makes you popular and attuned but almost entirely unlovable. Tough to get on with, easy to get over. Who’ll tolerate this if I myself can barely keep up? With the reeling and the bargaining? I’d compensate then, as if an abundant mind glistens with glass shards post car crash. There’s only two things that continue to fascinate me with their impermanence and confinement of an entire world into something singular, secular, sometimes lonely: hotels and lovers. Would you like to be a lover? Would you like to go to a hotel? Desire anesthetizes fear: knife cutting through physical matter and it’s too late to stop now and I asked for it myself so I shouldn’t retreat. In my fragile hopes again, a playground I don’t really play at anymore, but right now the verdict is that I’m going to live forever.

Yes, I complicate. That’s what complicated girls do. A pariah with no full stops in her arsenal. Think too much and don’t do nearly enough to show for it. So much time to kill and none to breathe! Because life hasn’t felt easy, I glued the burden to everything that makes up a little old me: but was I wrong? This old conviction is hanging by a thread like a loose button on a wool coat.

Maybe I mend things as much as I fuck them up. Equal ratio. Give me an ice cube, I’ll make a statue. Give me resonance, you’ll never be alone again. Give me something, anything, I’ll write a novel and make somebody in California smile. When elongating vowels and pausing in between the words to present your bestest thought no longer works, you can still count on me and I’ll still be there, a solid friend, your commute companion, a daughter with a sober heart, a sharp advisor.

“I like the way your mind works.”

It cuts through me violently but doesn’t hurt. A kiss is no different from lidocaine. Or cinnamon. Lucky girl, lucky world, lucky everything, stars above the ceiling or whatever, astigmatic lights, so much goodness woven and tangled into the distress ricocheting off the walls. You’re seeing underneath the bone. Desire anesthetizes fear.

“Well, thank you. Took some time to get here.”

Break eye contact, take a sip. Ugh.

One begs to be seen and heard, then resorts to the bathroom for some banging, and not the good kind but the solitary head-to-wall kind. Well, is this going to mean anything? Just because it’s disarming doesn’t mean it’s true, but I’m scrubbing my hands over the sink like a murder coverup to win more time, and it’s so easy to tell when a restaurant refills an Aesop bottle with cheap store brand soap. I just hope you can see that I am, in fact, Aesop soap in an Aesop bottle.

Go back to your table, silly.

In a few years, dressed in white and smug with a garter, or in gold holding up a big award, I’ll walk down the stairs, my own two feet carrying me through the night. There’s things to wish on and to fight for, eyelashes and 11:11’s and teeth to nails. Maybe I’ll look up into the sky and for once won’t have to choose. There’ll be a promise wrapped in parchment just for me. We shouldn’t have to choose. We can have everything. We can have complexity because we’re easy to love.