I’m so broken…
Not in the sense you’d imagine. Most people paint me as either saint or sinner, but there’s room for little else in their imaginations. They’re not busying themselves too much with that. After all, I’m not their main character. And that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be about me.
I understand their impulse. Impulse is pretty much where I live. I’m too indecisive to choose to go anywhere else. I’m often dragged or stand there, waiting. Most cosmic moments pass me by. Though, I’m content to watch. Always was.
As a kid, I loved playing third wheel to a four-part set. Only, I’d get really tired or cranky … My mom always made the other girls follow my nap schedule, so I’m spoiled. I jump back from the seriousness of the admission with my usual positivity, chirping at you, “But you know what? I make it up to you.”
And it’s true. Mechanic’s blood runs through my veins whether I know it or not. The intuition inside my head hums like a clockwork I can’t stop from ticking. Just looking, that nurturing nature takes its course and my hands find their way into the grease … I can take care of your squeakies.
For a while, I convinced myself there was a kind of solace to take in that. Something I could hold onto and cherish in being that person for you. I see the child in myself, looking up with those pigtails Mommy braided by my ears… “Can’t I just take that little bit for mee–?” I let my voice squeak. I am trying to convince you. I don’t care if you know it.
Let me enjoy serving that purpose in your great big world, won’t you? Pretty please?
I couldn’t see myself crumbling – neither the idol you were making me, nor how desperate I was to undermine her. For a long time, I even smirked down my nose at seeing what you could not. Your potential for good. Knowing your value beyond what you even see in you right now, feeling in my bones a faith in your purpose in this world…
But I shouldn’t be nosing that out or assigning a future to you that you don’t know you want. You remind me to stay in my lane – one of my sisters, telling me to take that pointy little finger and remember I had three more pointed right back at me. My mind’s eye is bobbing and weaving that head back and forth – such sass I can feel the hand gestures wafting up the air around me.
I could let the feeling of that slip away into another thought, happily taking me away into a smirk. I could ramble inside my own mind…
I don’t.
I sneeze and snort it away. I sit, instead, with the reminder of my own smugness and taste it, grainy in my mouth. My nose scrunched, I don’t like it. I want to spit but can’t. I’ll vomit. You half expect I will, which I see in your expression. I’m able to use it in my belly to hone in and buckle down like I once could. Showing you up like that never cut you off at the knees like they all thought. We’ll use it for us later. I perch you up on my cheekbones. They flush and cut ravines down my face.
You know I can’t look away. Not even after all these years. I won’t. Something hooks into me, and for some reason, you like that little lost girl expression on my face.
Look at me. I need your eyes to see me. See what they all refuse to see in me.
The little boy lost in you that feels like a complete set in me, filling in all the holes that have been stabbed through me over the years.
The value of the broken, the lost boys and misfit toys of another space and time… I see their purpose in bringing us all back to life. I want to be that mended thing, too, … set shiny and new up on the hill. But… by you. To be the beacon – your beacon. A beacon for you. Because we both know I want to measure up to that idol you were making me. I want to rise to meet you.
Only, it’s got to be my way … if in anything, in this.
Peeking over the rubble around me on the hull or leaning out the porthole, I can see it on the horizon. It kicks me in the chest like a drumbeat. So glad we almost made it, So sad they had to fade it … everybody wants to rule the world – my Captain plays Weezer in lieu of Tears for Fears over the loudspeakers. Yet the only thing distracting me from the tasks I have at-hand are the gnats from my filth.
Can’t you see? My spouse loves a broken thing, too. Only he can’t always see me as that. Broken. He tries to compartmentalize me that way, polishing me back off and trying so hard to protect me behind glass. There are times, I believe, we all do this to those we love. And because of love, we let you.
Isn’t that the give and take? The joy of giving and relinquishing control…
I’m working those buttons as fast as ever, but nothing’s happening. You’re staring daggers at the screen, soaking me up with your peripheral and asking why I’m looking down at the controllers in my hands. I’m trying to assign blame for the thing, explaining why it must be broken, while you adapt to the loss of my help.
Because I’m a broken thing. More broken now than I was before. Too broken to know how to move. But move, I must.
Move.
I feel the winds dragging off to the Isle of Misfit Toys, but I’m determined to keep my footing.
Women I’ve respected and see strength in are dying everyday. They speak to me from a different place, calling out from where they rest. Their eyes move in silence, crossing the rooms of my mind with warning. Be watchful, they tell me. You aren’t free from them yet.
And they’re right. The wolves will always descend. Here in the backwoods, I was too ignorant to see them for anything more than what they felt. Astray. Just like me.
They smile their fangs at me, knowing I find fondness in them. My heart opens up to them, like the little doll I said spoke to me in New Orleans. “She spoke to me,” I said, not fully knowing why, but sparking a veiled warning from the man. Wrapping Nemaya carefully for her flight home, he knew more about me than I did in that moment – the man behind the counter… Oblivious, I’d flit off to a bookstore, buying straight from an author, too self-absorbed in the moment to request his penning inside her pages.
We forget the value of our actions in those moments. Just the buying of the book was enough for him, but it racked me and still does… Another moment passing me by.
My father would have looked down his nose at me in that way father’s do – no words necessary to see the expectation he’d set for me. Not because I had anything to live up to, but because unselfishness was a requirement. And I’d need that. That little kick to not be a brat, softened by my mother’s roll of her eyes and gentle nudge – a solitary chicken-wing to remind me not to get hung up on the chastisement.
It’s the one-two punch all kids are waiting for – the good cop and the bad cop, working for our benefit, not to lock us up or tether us down.
Maybe that’s why she spoke to me, the trinket in my hand, that day. She saw the flowing together, the impact of the crashing of our waves on one another. She saw the shifting sands, the crowded bodies in the water moving about, just as haphazardly as I had been … as I’ve forced you to be, too.
I stop moving and almost sink from the change in buoyancy. The abruptness of it leaves an unintended ripple effect, which I’ve accepted as necessary. Meanwhile, everyone else fears being catapulted away.
This old girl’s broken, you see… But the tinker fairy in me loves fixing things. Just watch.