The most honest thing I can do is cry.

Five screws. One battery.

After months of licking the positive and the negative ends, I finally changed the batteries in the Roku remote. Well, one out of two of them.

My first line of defense with any remote is a firm slap in the palm and my electrolytes on the terminal. I’m not sure when I learned that adding a little spit would allow most remotes to carry on working indefinitely, but I play out this little routine more often than you’d think.

“Good enough,” I thought, reaching for the only new AAA in the drawer. “I could probably power the remote with a simple thought at this point…”

I found five screws in the old garden bed. “Fix it,” they said but I’m unsure if this can be fixed.

We were one.

Not like the Sun and Moon

or two peas in a pod 

or fire and ice

or an angel and the devil 

or two-of-a-kind

or any duo or pair.

Every other partnership has been established through the lens of two. Every friend, every lover, every family member. It’s the duality that is always seen first.

But with you…

It’s one. The blur between it all, no lines, no delineation, just the curve following its horizon til infinity. It’s been a sacred union all along. Even underripe and inexperienced it held the totality of all we could be. 

You aren’t my other half. You aren’t a missing piece. You are the one.

There is nothing to fix because nothing is broken. Sigh… nothing is broken.

I straddle the line between praise and condemnation. 

I’d cry myself into a muddy puddle if I could. 

My cells vibrate and shimmer and I want to spew and lash and cry or cling and kiss and laugh. 

I realized early on that my emotions run deeper and wider than what society deems appropriate.

After being called sensitive one too many times, I calloused over my humanity and slunk behind the iris of my eyes. 

Having time to spare, I book-hopped on the Barnes and Noble floor. Thinking “Don’t cry in here!” Using everything within me to keep the tears neatly stacked up behind the dam. 

The most honest thing I can do is cry. 

I want all the flat surfaces in the house to be littered with trinkets you were too nervous to collect all these years. I want your stupid socks in the way of my next step.  

I drove through the damp and wealthy neighborhoods to find the best park to cry in.  Beyond a thousand shades of heirloom green and steep driveways, these homes clutch to preserve a legacy no one even knows about.

Unpaved and borderless, I parked myself on a bench in the misty rain.

I watched as someone scared a gaggle of geese only to throw their trail mix at them in hopes of “communing with nature”, I laughed out loud once they were out of earshot. Some people will never get it.

The edges of my bellbottoms and the suede of my off-brand Birkenstocks soaked through with rain. My daily uniform is so impractical. If I squinted my ears just right I could hear the water seep and crackle and pop into the ground. The swallows swooped and dived. The humid breeze splashed my face, and the dam slowly eroded.

How many maidens have cried at this riverbank’s edge hoping to seep into the ground, too?

Oh, to dissolve and disappear back into the Great Mother…

But me disappearing into the ground isn’t part of this story yet, I must regain the will to live and empower myself with a simple thought. I am the remote and the show must go on.

The monsters are loose and roaming freely. They rearrange time and misplace my belongings. Nothing is where it should be…

xx

RissaJean