Dear Aanika,
Like you I know what its like to be a bird without wings, broken airplanes, and those paper cranes bleeding of lost childhoods and empty lungs.
I know what its like to smile and know that its a replacement for the tears that just won't come.
I know what it's like to forget how to not be broken, how to remember what living is. I know what its like to be obsessed with anatomy as if its possible to fix something buried beneath shattered collarbones. I know what its like to forget what 'happy' means, and to only remember faded promises.
I used to tell people that I once was a gymnast, that I could do backflips and my limbs could stretch like jello. I wove intricate lies about the one hour four year old class I took one summer when I almost learned to summer sault, and we jumped on trampolines and I never figured out how to be the highest, how to stay away from the ground.
I was creative- I just wanted to believe that once I had something unique no one else had- I wanted people to believe in me. But they didn't, and I wasn't.
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For a while I loved that my name was a country, a people, a river, a history and the object of wars and a religion- but then I learned all things my six letters could be.
J O R D A N
I learned that first letters also mean civil war and Molotov cocktails exploding in shrapnel ankles.
That second letters shaped like unbroken cheerios can mean guilty, just for being a girl, full of flooded eyes and puppet grins and the molecule reactions that make up clavicles and elbows and dust soaked lungs.
I learned that R for run - read- real- render - river can also mean thirst and land mines and race to the well before the soldiers come when I was eight.
When I was nine I learned that D means 'don't' and 'dig into secrets' and to be remembered, you have to die. I learned that the fourth letter is homeless and barbed wire fences and 'dreams' everyone wishes into non existence and scattered peoples, and persecution. D became synonymous with history which shape shifted into the tattered pages of the religion that forgot I existed when the flood came, the covenant of a god who closed his eyes while Noah was helping the stragglers, and I was nine and drowning and imploding and running to the horses, but everyone was always just faster.
That's what history means to me- because who ever survives had the longest legs, because after all they were faster than asphyxiation.
I knew what war was w hen I was five- my words burned away condescension and I still believed in saving and teaching children to unbelieve in the end of the world. I learned that A for aftermath, almost never is remembered when people fight for distorted borders and copper eye children. A is for almost , which really means 'not good enough' but consolation prize good, too.
I turned eleven and N fell into the sockets between my lungs and brain, and N meant 'no' and 'never remembering the babies crying in the bomb shelters' and 'no such thing as god' and 'Nile rivers that were like my name river, both of them gave people a reason to fight. Just like 'n words' always seem to do.
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Aanika, your name is beautiful and the syllables mean beauty in being broken and that there will always be a tomorrow and that sometimes we don't learn what it means to be happy until we find ourselves, and sometimes the vehicle ourselves comes in, is learning to fall in love and give everything we have. Some of us don't know how to love halfway, some of us are gifted because that means we will feel deeper than some adults and politicians ever will, but also we will fall and fall and cry and bleed just like the dying, because in many ways we are two opposites. We are breathing and we are fading- we are always semi living and mostly dying- because the way we figure out who we are is by loving with all we got, which we do anyway, and we get hurt and in the process eventually we find ourselves. But when we do- that's a person whose traveled the world in experiences and breaking and coming home and learning what home is and fucking and then crying at night alone in brittle bone beds.
Some of us will never be perfect and will always be shattering- we will be the future of the world all though that scares the shit out of us, because everything we do ends up burning- and one day maybe we will have a wisdom we won't deserve.
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I didn't believe I would live to turn fifteen- truth: I still don't believe it. I'm a walking oxymoron filled with black holes and stardust craters. I don't make sense, I'm finding lost elephants named Dumbo in your book case although you took it to first grade for show and tell and it never came home. I'm pygmy ponies you find escaped from electric fences that gallop miniature hooves into your live at 13, when you haven't wanted a 'horsie' since you were seven.
But dying was never good enough for me- it wasn't showy enough, I wanted to be the neutron star that everyone sees on its way to celestial afterlife. I wanted to have battle scars of internal fights that I was too terrified to mark myself externally with, I wanted blue inked tattoos of words I believed in to scream my story.
I wanted people to see me and the tiny crisscrossed cursive words I littered on my wrists and heels & know 'that girl's strong, she's a survivor, she's beautifully broken.' I wanted someone else to call me empty, but I'm too good at hiding.
I always wanted a name that breathed and asphyxiated full of comets committing suicide and a word that echoed in tragedy, so I wasn't the only one who could see my broken bones.
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I think we are also different- because you dream cried about being loved when gone, I yearned to be invisible and to stand above everyone as a trial period of being dead, and have everyone love me and cry, I thought if everyone was sad because they needed me, I'd find happiness in empty numbing.
I've been obsessed with dying, with disappearing with being unseen since I knew what it meant when hush hush voices whispered of passing away.
Sometimes my almost brother , who turned the tables and stitched crooked growing up into my bones because I don't really remember what parts of my skin he touched, would run away in hide and seek tag, and pass me by. But he always came back.
The breathers everyone loved kept getting lost around the time they found me, maybe that was a bad year for directions and why I was born to obsess over finding the way to the sky. Maybe I want to redeem myself for being toxic, for infecting people I don't even know who make my mom cry and my dad bleed grief when they go away. Maybe i believe if I can find those people, if I can make it up there with all them, everyone won't be sad anymore. Maybe then I'll understand 'simple.'
No one says its my fault and nobody would ever think it but people keep dying and I'm still breathing and I'm lucky, so its probably my fault. Sometimes I didn't take communion or I chewed the tablet on Sundays when I wasn't supposed, I probably upset God back when I believed in him. Sorry?
But God's a hypocrite because he said he would turn the other cheek, but sorry's not enough because I have whiplash from turning by now.
So, I don't believe in you anymore? I'm not sorry to a being that never existed.
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Aanika, don't hate me?
Aanika, I'm sorry I just don't know?
Aanika, did you know when I was little I used to wear a cloud bathrobe because then I could pretend I'd just woken up, when I didn't remember crying myself to sleep, because once I grew too big I still wore it so that I could pretend I still hadn't made the connection between crying, and being in pain.
My brother is borderline autistic- that's what my dad said what, but he is and he isn't. He has a processing delay and sometimes I don't realise and I yell at him because he doesn't register and I break my own heart. He has a normal life, he can call me 'bitch' and I always tell on him although really I'm not afraid of his words, but of their truth.
He's sweeter than most kids, and he learned from me how suicidal in middle school can mean defending the underdog and refusing to be a target, he learned from me just how to get beat up for things that in my culture as a girl, only sometimes wou ld end with me shunned. Because girls don't hit , they don't openly do anything, because now he's been damaged because they call him slurs and they kick him and still he won't , won't , won't, only sometimes, cry in front of them.
I know what its like to love someone so much and not know how sometimes they work. I know what its like to feel guilty for wanting someone to be happy, and feel so so so sad inside, that you don't know how to save them, because really I can't save anyone, because my own self is long gone.
I love him dearly and sometimes I read about the way you love your brother, and I feel so so guilty. I provoke him because that's what I do, and he can't control himself angry and sometimes I push him away and I can't seem to get through to anyone else not even my own ribs, so my words hurt him. I cry and I hate myself because as a reflex when he is the best brother in the world, I just can't find the resolve to acknowledge him in a positive way sometimes. Sometimes I can't be vulnerable and I'm selfish because my fear of being vulnerable causes me to hurt him, I don't always mean to, and I always wish he had a better sister. I'm glad he has too other and sometimes, my parents yell at me for little things even if he started it, and sometimes I'm glad they are more careful, because at least someone is smart enough to protect him from me.
Always I just don't deserve to be his sister.
Even if inside, I love him and want to fucking kill the little dip shits who harass him at school. And I told their brothers and them next time I saw the kids that if they treat anyone like that ever ever again I will get every teacher at my old school involved, every parent and personally kick their little asses. I told them that if they touch my brother or anyone the way they did on the Day of Silence, my 8th grade class will come back and raise hell and I will rip them apart.
Even if I can't always keep him safe from me, I can do everything in my power to make sure anyone else who tries to hurt him , cries and never tries to harm another human being again.
I'm mean sometimes, and probably I've damaged my brother the way my sisters once hurt me by never ever being there. But I'm not cruel. I"m so caught up with hurting and being lonely and learning not to cry at the wrong time, that he's there but I'm just so goddamn scared. I want so bad sometimes to have the capacity to let him in, but it's scary , to just trust.
Sometimes I'm mean to him for no reason, when I don't mean to be, when I mean to say ' I want to cry but can't, and everything hurts, and I love you and please dont' ever turn out like me.' I feel awful and want to take it back. I'm barely holding onto myself, and I'm never dependable, and he's really just a baby, and 12 and growing up.
I tell him he's not allowed to date, because I know myself at that age and I'm scared he'll meet a girl like me. I'm scared shitless someone like me exists because that means the world is dissipating fast, and I know that I'm a girl and I've hurt him and he's too good of a person for there to be a girl out there to have the chance to make him cry. I don't want his heart to break, because as long as his arteries pump blood through his veins, as long as he's still smiling , I'm selfish- but then I have second chances and thirds. Then I can fix him and me, then I can show him how to play basketball and listen to his guitar and I can read him stories though he will complain he's way too old. I can get back all the time I wasted hating myself, and thinking anything other than he could save me.
Again, I'm selfish, because while my hope lies with him , that's how I convince myself to stop. Because I'm too far gone to let myself wallow in the understanding of how much I don't deserve to be his sister, to be related.
Sometimes I wonder who I am, where I came from, and how I went from his pixie sister to the girl that wishes she could just tell him 'i love you, so so much, more than anyone else in the world sometimes'.
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I'm fifteen and I've been broken kite strings for as long as I can remember. I'm fifteen, and its easier to put scissors to microscopic pieces of my hair as a form of numbing, then to break my skin and have to admit that I haven't been whole in a long time. I'm fifteen clipboards whose ashes have been scattered in arenas, and my freckles look like hoses whose tentacles have been strangled in barbed wire fences, and fairytale concepts that eventually, the rain will stop.
I'm almost sixteen windowpanes shattered by the irrevocably of shadow words etched in their glass, and for me the natural instinct of pushing everyone away, is a simple as not breathing, sometimes is for my lungs. Trusting that scotch tape fingers are going to reinforce my stitches rather than break them, is harder than forcing my asphyxiated lungs to breathe a foreign substance called oxygen.
I was thirteen when the sun pierced my freckles, and I could cry because the outside hurt, and hot water sent sun burn to infect my veins. That was when I was lucky, that was after I'd learned that winter always means lonely, that was after I learned best friends are easily capable of breaking you apart- that was at a time when getting skin cancer, was the worst of my worries. When my eyes burned and I threw tantrums, because my skin hurt, I was young then, for a rare moment, but I wasn't, I was just forestalling the inevitable.
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Your poem Ave Maria- is me, me in fourth grade through eight but with my best friend. It's me deciding she was one of my first concious causes, that I could protect her and she could give me another half, because I always seem to be missing parts.
We burned years and drama and left all that behind after I tried to sabotage her and she decided she was safer being friends with me, because I reminded her of how easy some humans break. And how good at it she was.
She loved me and obsessed over being loved and wasn't sure who she was and whether sexuality was something she was supposed to think about in sixth grade. She knew I was worth protecting even though I scared her and I talked about dying and told her I would die at twelve a year before and I was morbid. She thought I was crazy and intricate and strangely religious and believing in myself or just gullible, but I didn't think I'd live to be 13, because I thought the way the universe works if you hurt too bad eventually mercy or god or Mary or comets let you go.
I thought it was fair. Not even. I went to Venice for my 13th because I lived in Italy, obviously, celestial objects just ignore humans.
Somehow we got stronger in seventh grade and we built up realistic expectations and I never told her that people hated me and didn't talk to me and poured water on my seat and found ways to make me cry and hide in the bathroom till I could be late to school. I told them I was popular cause I was at first and I was falling for boys and I was Italian and thriving , so they would miss me, and they did. But I failed because I did something wrong and some girls decided to break me apart, and they almost did. Now I know what they did has a name and its about culture and silence and shunning and I was a victim, but she didn't and I didn't.
I came home and later that year she told me she was Bi, but I already knew that and it was just who she was. And we were everything and forever and soulmates and she never let go of me and I held on so so so tight, because my gift is holding on.
Mostly because I'm afraid of letting go. I've always been, I don't know how to let go.
Last year I pushed her away and before she taught me to trust again and gave me everything and promised me that high school wouldn't change us. I hurt her but she couldn't live without me, she needed me in her life and then we changed and we weren't as intense but we were perfect and we fit and we just made sense. She was my everything- I was hers for a little while, but she doesn't see in pieces, ever.
This year , I became too much for her. I understand I'd be scared of catching something from me too, because depression and being molested and crying and not sure what sexuality you are can often be contagious . I waited for her, and now I'm learning what childhood and losing everyone never seems to have taught me- that it's not always bad to let go, that its possible without cracking down the middle.
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The sun bleeds paper trails of moon bitten stars, which is what my lung looks like when pressed onto origami sheets.
Today I'm a melting pot of neutron stars and illicit colored pencils.
Aanika, I think I'm born to be lost. I think I was always born to be dying, I've never really lived.
i am always scared.
I scare people because I use words and I say things hoping that its okay to jump, and most of the time the glass shatters and I'm to heavy for sky scrapers.
I don't know what perfect its- except my baby cousins, my brother, the horses I've fallen in love with.
I fill silence with black and blue words, and I burn purple ashes of things that people dont' want to hear, and truths in complicated metaphors that everyone gives me weird looks for using in everyday speech. Although really, I am hiding the lack of the painful inflections yearning to fall from my collarbone with more words, so that they can't see what I won't say, can't say.
Sometimes, the world isn't pretty enough, and I like my words, I like my metaphors, I like being able to feel that fireflies flicker out for a reason and baby birds stop chirping because they aren't hungry anymore.
I've never wanted to catch they sky, just find it.
I've never wanted to end the world, just be in it.
I've never worried over whether summer rain was warm, but more wondered why it rains in summer, and how long I'll be able to chase lightening for.
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Aanika, this is me, this is the broken rotary blades buried in my vocal chords. I'm too lucky to openly tell people sometimes I want to be over, but not lucky enough to believe that if I'm over, there's something waiting for me.
That's what I'm scared of- if I'm over , I'll be alone forever.
Love
Jordan
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