This Time, Unravel Me Quickly, continued
You suggested we write together on the porch. A Memoir by Sam Moe
This is the 2 / 2 installment of “This Time, Unravel Me Quickly.” The 1st installment can be found here.
7.
Salt-licked stove, burned out kitchen, marionette body, face a mirror, the lights were green when your lungs gave into panic, they won’t care about the bandages or blood, they know everything is a lie, a trick, ravenous candles with hungry Mary statues, saints arrive in your dreams, taking all the animals from the land and placing them in boxes alongside dolls, you fold your body into a paper bird when they’re not around, light your wings on fire in the tub, don’t want to disclose about the not-good, not-right, not sleeping through the night, what does it matter, mattress stuffed with money, with butterflies, gemstones, Tuesdays and tears, miss your partner, miss the summertime, missed the crush before it even formed, an impossible dream to imagine someone might hold you like a person instead of a knife.
8.
That night, you come into my bedroom while I pretend to read. I think to myself, I’ll always remember this moment. The way the lamp illuminated your raven-black hair, your pale pajamas, the fact that neither of us was wearing a bra and for once I didn’t feel self-conscious. We were both reading Mary H.K. Choi and keeping journals. You asked if I was doing okay and I lied. I still love you, but what could you possibly have done for me? I wondered how it felt for you to be loved so easily by everyone else. You were like a lightning bolt, impossible to ignore, always glowing from within, deadly to the touch. We stayed in bed for what was likely an hour but only felt like a few seconds, and when you left, I listened for your footsteps as you climbed the double staircase to the second floor. The next—and final—night, I waited for your soft steps and gentle knock; you never came.
9.
The cabin in the daytime is filled with bright verdant light. We sit at a table on the porch, filled with slick stones in the center for an electric fire, and drink mugs of coffee. As breakfast cooked, the couples kissed and sang. I took pictures of everyone teasing each other, tossing confetti in the air, cooking oatmeal in pots overflowing with water. I knew I just needed to get through the last day and I would be able to rest when I got home.
You suggested we write together on the porch. I started keeping track of your moods in the margins, unsure how you could sway from loving to irritated in a matter of seconds. [I thought I would eventually become too much for you, but as I recount this story, you’re still in my heart and my life. We make plans to meet on Martha’s Vineyard, though I haven’t told you yet I don’t have enough money to return home. This is the seventeenth year I’ve been hurting myself, and I hope it’s the last. I know if I return home, I’ll unravel. When I return to my current home, it will be as a knot instead of a person.]
[After relapsing a few weeks ago, I return to school wearing compression bandages. A friend comments I look like a zombie, unaware my skin is secretly oozing. I start wearing my mother’s handmade bracelets and necklaces, each bead bright and green like the day we sat on the porch. I wish I could text you to complain. I know you would understand.]
Everyone heads to the water. I stay inside to finish a freelance project, a job I’ve hated and worked at for almost a decade. As a ghostwriter of romance and erotica, I was either receiving high praise or getting fired for not including enough flirtations between characters. The cabin was empty and I wanted to explore, look through your things, and make a fossil of you in my mind. Instead, I ate. Leftover pizza, pieces of toast with jam, chips and cashews. I had been curbing my appetite for a few days, pretending I didn’t have any needs beyond water and wedges of cheese to feed the dog. Meanwhile, you were tossing your body into the lake, your partner not far behind you. Several hours later the five of you returned, brandishing Polaroid photographs, each sunburnt and teal-hued. I asked if I could have one and you said no.
10.
Later, we sit in the hot tub, rainbow lights illuminating our faces. My bandages have fallen off and the hot water feels good on my scars. Our friends joke about a man in the woods who watches us and wears a pumpkin mask. I think back to my ex, who waited outside my house, listening to my phone conversations so he could have something to argue with me about. Once, when he unlocked my computer as I slept, he walked over to where I slept in my father’s foyer and loomed over me. I remember letting my eyes open slightly, registering his presence. He stood, breathing over me, for several minutes before saying my name in an irritated whisper.
— Are you talking shit about me to your ex-boyfriend? he asked.
— I’m just placating him, I lied.
I would ghost him weeks later. This, too, is an experience that has been deposited in my body like calcium, sand, and sometimes silt. My memory spirals like snail shells and I am incapable of breaking the cycle. I have yet to be diagnosed with OCD. The intrusive thoughts—of drowning by accident, of the fabricated man in the woods appearing with the face of my ex-boyfriend, of my mother falling ill while I don’t have cell service—enter my mind like small needles, piercing the surface of my skull, remaining there until we leave.
11.
After we leave, you call and tell me you’re in it with me for the long haul, and that you love me, but you say so many positive affirmations I start crying, I can hardly recall what was said. I feel I am a propped open oyster, exposed constantly and I don’t know how to seal myself up again. We won’t see each other until graduation, and I’ll never forget the way you entered the room in heels and a dress. Our mentors tried to talk to you and you pushed them aside, saying, No, I need to see her, then you embraced me in a warm hug and I forgot we hadn’t spoken since the cabin. It was like we were starting all over again after I’d joined my insides back together. I missed you so much, you shouted over the cheering and the cap toss. This time, unravel me quickly, I thought but didn’t speak aloud.
Sam Moe is the author of Cicatrizing the Daughters (FlowerSong Press, Winter 2024), Grief Birds (BS Lit, 2023), Heart Weeds (Alien Buddha Press 2022), and the chapbook, Animal Heart (Harvard Square Press 2024). Her short story collection, I Might Trust You is forthcoming from Experiments in Fiction (Winter 2024). She has been accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (2024) and received fellowships from the Longleaf Writer’s Conference, the Key West Literary Seminar, and Château d’Orquevaux.