If you decide this story is incoherent, I want the world to know I have a constellation of three freckles under my wrist from when I had anorexia. Are three stars even a constellation? I want to say so. All of the daily shots made a discoloration, where it used to be calm, fragile, and new under there. Maybe it’s incorrect, that the freckles came from illness, that changed my body forensically, but when I look back: I want someone to know I find it true.

& so, it is a tale as old as time, the looks I used to judge others with. A saccharine kind of arsenic, the way I teased and whispered down the subway trains in NYC: that could never be me. My love would never leave, I’d spit like a candle flame, not realizing I was holding a candle. Flames catching.

 My sister’s hair caught on fire on her birthday; the happiest day of the year for her. Her 21 extra chromosome not mattering, the smattering of green icing because she was born on St. Patrick’s Day, blending in with smoke and flame. Everyone was okay, but my friend and I just screamed. And at least I had her that day, arm in arm, knuckles white, to let it all out, in the falling apart– we reacted the same way. Even on a birthday on St. Patrick’s day, luck evades–

Even the happiest of things/days/moments/loves blows away. You told me I was beautiful the day my grandma died from dementia, the act of losing herself. The rain pelting on my face, my hair in a messy braid I needed to sever- I loved you at that moment, but I knew it was one sided. A dice that will not roll right–but I loved you anyways. Clunking, jolting, moving back and forth from where I’m standing to daydreaming, to wondering, to gravity bringing me down, holding that leash, watching you walk away, wondering if we were going to be something. Now we have a son, and we’re falling apart, and was it worth the weaving? Your ribs near my stare. The haphazard streaks of pitting us together, peeling apart our cores, creating the best son in the world, then watching us fracture?

You know, my grandma, she used to know how to make chocolate chip cookies from scratch. She didn’t need a recipe and they would turn out fluffy, perfectly, made. I knew love kept her recipes in her head. She remembered all the ways she baked for others, maybe not remembering their names, but remembering how it felt to knead something. In the end, I couldn’t visit her, wanting to preserve our conversations that were already memories. She told me how to use conditioner right when she saw clumps in my hair, she told me about puberty, she said she would never leave. We all fold into two truths and a lie, eventually. And so I learned, love makes cowards of all of us. I did the wrong thing. I should have gone and recited the recipe. Flour, mix in with the wet ingredients (tears are okay), and add in extra sugar. We used to sneak brown sugar like fiends– I’d whisper to her, if I could go over reality again with a fine-tooth comb. Rake my hands down her face for days. Wanting her to stay, withering.

 I cup my hands to your face one more time and already miss your voice. The gravelly husk, the way you smoked and paced outside on cheap balconies and saved your paycheck for rainy days that never came. Tell me lies, I say. One truth.

I love you. I’m leaving. I’m staying.

But I know love doesn’t stay in when penned. I cocked my brows when you said you had to go, pen digging into my knees, ready to scribble the words I want to remember, thinking not again. My Mom kicked me out when I was 21. I lived in ten places in two years, which changed me. This was before I met you. I told myself: never again will I go place to place. Memorizing countertops that didn’t matter in the end. Trying to do the dishes the way each family liked, but each family did it differently. I still don’t know if knives are up or downward facing, sky or falling down, because it was different everywhere I stayed-

 Even silverware makes no sense anymore. Other things that confuse me include love that’s begging to be lost. I say, I love you. You dwindling, favorite way to be taunted, type of ghost–

Get going. Even if you haunt me.