Like Whisky on an Empty Stomach

I rolled the blister on my thumb, watched the blood swell in the full moon glow through aluminum trailer slats. 

I said ‘You don’t scare me. You loving me scares me.’

He told me I was stubborn. 

I told him that was the only way I knew to be strong. 

I never used to talk about the weather, sweet peas or wild clover.  

Someone once wrote that it all comes and goes in waves. 

Maybe like every other cliche, this too shall pass. 

My hands were supposed to be soft, dainty and feminine but they wear calluses and bruises, scars over tanned skin. 

I was supposed to stay fearless. 

Like I was when I was little, fingers in black mane and a smiling face. 

I used to hike to Escalante’s cross to pray, I don’t even know where to hike to these days.

I need something.

To find something. Someone. 

A safe place. Somewhere. 

Maybe I’ll get a tattoo and dye my hair blue. 

Maybe I already did. 

But what would you have to say?

And would it even matter anyway?

I always wanted to fight. Or learn to cuz it never was in me. 

I’ve gained no war but feel like I’ve lost a part of myself. 

A peaceful quietness given up in exchange for strength. 

The barbed wire I strung around me grew like weeds. 

Only the ones that liked blood could stay it seems. 

They were double tough and callused, I suppose the reason they caught my eye. 

And then I just became some broken person in a bar with tears on the brim of my eyelids. 

Because I’ve always been trying to be everything and I have become nothing. 

Yet somehow I created this, this chaos. 

Someone’s yelling and it’s so loud I hear silence, see lips moving. 

Peeled myself off the floor this morning. 

Tear drops and flakes of mascara on a sunburned wrist. 

Asked myself who the hell I was as I stared at exhausted eyes in a wavy mirror. 

Ratted mess of hair somehow reminded me of all these paths in my life. 

They’re all leading me different ways. 

But I have to pick one. 

I have to decide what I am, who, where.. why.

Why I am.

Hitting me like whisky on my empty stomach.

Why am I? 
XoXo, Gussie