Did you know that scars can still hurt long after the flesh and skin have been mended?
It has something to do with nerve endings getting trapped in the scar tissue.
This is to say, some wounds never fully heal.

The Greek word for wound is trauma.
I once read a book about the way trauma reshapes your brain.
This is to say, there are some things you can never get over.

✷✷✷

I could open this essay with some tired old cliche about love to tug on the reader’s heartstrings or some highly dramatized “data” about alcoholism designed to scare children and arouse Pentecostal prohibitionist pastors, but the punk in me will not allow the former and whatever is left of the Catholic in me will not allow the latter. The truth is that I am uninterested in the heteronormative definition of love and I am even more uninterested in painting my first real romance in broad black and white strokes; her body always looked most seductive draped in flamboyant, luminous gray.

It’s a cold November night. Thousands of stars swallow the dark cloudless sky, watching over an industrial building sitting in a lone dense forest. A factory of some sort, a place seen as “off-limits” to the residents living nearby.

Once upon a time, there was a mountain that had existed since the formation of the world. It was twice as ancient as its brethren in the west, who teemed with both human and nonhuman life, and by the time written records came around, the mountain was either a footnote or an unsolvable mystery. This was for two reasons, the first of which being the bones that lined pathways worn down with constant travel and age, and the second being the dragon.

1. Dionysus

I see Her everywhere. Through the window, under the ice, in the water. I can’t sleep because I see Her face staring back through the chilly glass panes of my bedroom window. I can feel Her watching me everywhere I go. She whispers in dozens of voices. She watches with hundreds of eyes. Sometimes I feel Her freezing fingertips brush across my skin.

I know that I must sound crazy, rambling on about being watched by a woman that no one else can see. But I need to tell someone, whenever I try to talk to other people, they seem to just stare through me…

Time stretched to an eternity. A minute felt like an hour and vice versa. God knew how long I had been sitting there, staring. Or maybe he didn't. There are things that even gods can’t tell.

My eyes must've been open for days, weeks. Staring.

But, no, that can't be right, it's only been a few seconds.

Time is fickle, it can stretch further than we can comprehend or become smaller than we know. To say that you can tell the time is white lie, made only for comfort.

Things started simple enough - I was going about my life as a veterinarian. I worked primarily with pets and strays, lots of cats, dogs, and illnesses. For whatever reason, there seemed to be a sudden increase in animals with worms, both in pets and in strays. I couldn't figure out what it could be. My team and I did everything we could, even going so far as to quarantine the afflicted animals.

Nepantilism
Divided in two
Choque de mi conciencia
inner self troubles.

Choque
What should I choose now?
Cultural Identities
Choose so you can bow.

Transcendent
This duality
Accept the power of it
the reality.

Bocacalle
Sal, mestiza ya
Do what you’d like, it’s your choice
Solo TU cuerpo.

Homology
No place to call home
Queer or not, does it matter?
Invalid always.

The carnival train, full of colors, clowns, animals, and one headless giraffe, barrelled towards the floor vent where Mrs. Macaroni stood, screaming a terrible ‘here comes the train’ out of its whistle. Mrs. Macaroni seemed glued to the spot, and when the train crashed into her thigh, she fell with a screech onto the linoleum floor, and breathed her last breath. Suddenly, Michael sprang to his feet from where he had been lying pantsless and shoeless mere feet away, saw Mrs. Macaroni lying on the ground, and screamed a heartbreaking and high-pitched ‘NOOO!’

“Gary, where are the keys?”, said Kathy, my mom.

She was in a rush to find those keys, just to get rid of her only daughter. I deserved it though, considering her only daughter was an embarrassment to her.

“Honey, would you slow down.” said Gary, my dad.

My dad could care less what was occurring with my upcoming absence. He was always too busy reviewing game footage for his high school football team, which I’m pretty sure he loved more than me.

“Stevie are you ready to leave?” Mom asked.

I didn’t really want to die. It struck me as a strange realization as I stood on the edge of the pedestrian path on the bridge, looking down at the dark water below, and contemplating the jump that I had been hoping would end my life. Despite my decision, though, it was true that death was not the optimal answer to my problems. I did wish there was a different way. All I really wanted was for the pain to end. I wanted to stop suffering, to stop fucking everything up, and had reached the point that I thought that this was the only way.

At one point, I was an only child, and I imagine that the spotlight shone on me. I don’t remember, however, as my younger sister came along less than two years later. I also don’t remember a time when she wasn’t ill and commanded all my mother’s attention. She was diagnosed at a young age with muscular dystrophy. While my father checked out to cope, my mother grounded herself by leaping into action, doing all the research she could and doting on my sister. We didn’t have much serious illness in our family; in fact, we had several relatively accomplished athletes.

After hours of deliberation and arguments, Don Juan Rashid was sentenced to death by firing squad. It was a fate he knew all too well that was reserved by God for him, and he accepted it without any hesitation, almost praying for it to come, because when that first bullet would penetrate his back, there would be a well-deserved pain, and then an all too merciful sleep. "Finally," he breathed when he was sentenced, "a cure for my insomnia."

“I can’t do this anymore, I’m so sorry,” I whisper, kissing my sleeping daughter on the forehead. She stirs but she doesn’t wake. I head to the front door. My mother is asleep on the sofa, face set in the disappointed scowl that I’ve grown so accustomed to seeing. She always said I would never be a good mother, that I was too selfish and lazy to be able to take care of another person. She would get the last word again. I shut the door soundlessly, and then begin the short walk to the highway.

I didn’t look back as I untangled myself from my father’s grasp, and bolted for the front door, losing my vintage Zeppelin T-shirt for the effort. I blew through the threshold, unintentionally, but satisfactorily taking the screen off its hinges along the way. I tripped from the impact sending a cloud of red dust billowing into the air, as I smacked the dirt loose. I placed both hands flush on the ground pushing up with all my might. The fall had hurt my hip, not my head I knew why I was running and I knew why I couldn’t stop.

They call us the ghetto medics, 911 rig riders responding to emergencies in the 313. Bullets over our heads, gang fights by our trucks, drug seekers faking pain, and drivers trying to beat our lights and sirens; like they got something better to do. I didn’t even mention the patients yet, shoot I didn’t even start on the drama which is fubar; fucked up beyond all repair, and I would say this patient right now is just that.

“Manny, what is you doin’?” my partner Paul scoffed at me as I run over to the first patient.

“I’m trying to save this guy, what do you think?”

The bathtub sits empty, full of cold water, and cold hearts and cold memories. The sun seeps in through the window, and refracts against the water, casting rainbows on the white tile floor. Taho knows it is supposed to be beautiful, but it is the ugliest thing he has ever seen. He cannot bear the sight of the tub, cold and lifeless. He blames the bathtub. He blames his hands. He blames the grains of sand. But mostly, he blames himself.

~

I was falling. I mean I had fallen before; from a bed to a plush carpet, a bus to the muddy ground, from the 13th stair all the way to the 1st. Yes, I had fallen before; always getting a scrape or a bruise or lesson, but I would get up. I would survive; they were never really a great distance. But at seventeen that fall from that bus felt like it broke bones, tore ligaments, ripped flesh a gape, but at 20, I know it was just a bruised ego, and at 14, when I missed that stair and my life seemed to flash before my eyes and I thought I’d die.

White

I realize that there are a pair of well-worn men’s brown loafers in front of the door next to the shoe cabinet that were not there before. What’s going on? The plates are clattering in the kitchen and I remember that I haven’t said anything yet so I quietly shout-out, “Assalam wa alaikum.” 

Her history course was never that interesting. Dry reviews of the local natives and how much it sucked to be them. But today the professor had promised something different - a field trip. She gazed out the window of the small bus and watched the countryside roll by. The other students talked and laughed, white noise fading behind her. Her eyes followed the moving vegetation and power lines. She was skating along it somehow, so fluid and fast. Gray and brown, dust and dirt, until a sea of green emerged.

Let me tell you a story about Jimmy, I watched over the years his evolution and I acted in a few scenes of his play. I watched people scurry away, as if they were running from the funk of a skunk, leaving only me there to say, “Hey Jimmy, how the hell you been?”
I could not participate in the mass exodus, Jimmy was my neighbor possibly my friend.

My grandfather is shattered. If I could see the damage, I imagine it would look like shards of a broken mirror, the glass all mixed up and scattered throughout the front yard. He digs, slamming the metal spoon into the wet dirt. Clumps of grass are discarded, left to dry out in the heat of the day. Their roots reach out like thin, white arms, each limb fighting to free itself from the black and green masses. They lay, upturned, wilting and left to die out in the sun.

"Grandpa?" I whisper, but he ignores me.

“Looks like rain.”