What the Curators Leave Out; What the Artist Wants You to Know

I. Myself 

In her, I saw the forgiveness 

The confusion of morning blinks in distant beds

The quiet we wish we had when we spoke to the boys 

We claim to love

In her,

There I was, a clattering mess

Too much space to bear my own weight I wish I didn’t own

Because what is our own presence if not known by

The flashbulb memories 

Illuminating somber faces

Or the loss of seemingly immortal youth 

Leaving all too soon-

How must I mourn her?

When I can barely remember her

Only bright

bright 

Stars I swear I saw but

Do not exist yet

Only lullabies and goodbyes 

Only hellos and sugared snow cones

At the carnival

We almost kissed at

How may I celebrate her?

In all of her noises

And all of her spite

Her space

With little to grieve 

With little to take 

But with all to give. 

How do we write in a way that honors all that was meant to be? We lose so much in the misremembering, in the blindness we misinterpret for truth. How do we mourn myths when they are all we are told? Voices echo until they are indistinguishable and there are no answers but two eyes asking to perceive me, waiting for permission, when there is no permission to give. I am to love and be loved by the greats. I will never have a time of death, only times of witness; where the world will ask and I will lie, blessing it to be true. 

The lie? I am one of the greats. I am the myth of which you’ve been told. I am the words you try to hear within the silence of a childhood bedroom, outgrown. I am the empathy you never received and all the answers you never believed in. In me lies the only meaning that mattered: my own.  

II. Yourself 

The lie doesn’t need much explanation, nor help

It is only when the rooms grow crowded with questions, all unwanted,

Do I lessen myself to make space for you

You: pointed and stressed and unforgiving—

You are hidden in the shadows of my mirrors 

The forced crinkle of my brows

And the phone calls from my parents,

asking me to come home

It’s far too dark for such a young

Pretty 

Respectable 

Girl

To be out doing who knows what 

Doing who knows who

When all I want to tell them is, on these nights, they must let me go

The places I go to drown out the questioning are the loudest

And each time, I’m convinced I’m in love

With myself

With you

With the girl dancing horribly 

And the boy counting on his courage to join her

These are the nights I recall feeling most human

Where my mouth may feel full of cotton, but 

To wake up

To witness and to love because I can 

Because this type of love cannot be found in the whites of museum walls 

This is the love that asks me to remember and compose all the stories I have wished to tell 

But couldn’t 

The times I let myself think about you

You—

The quick whip ready on your tongue, unimpressed eyes, malnourished heart, Heaven Knows you’re Miserable all the time kind of you

Those times I feel the most grief 

The most dread 

The most longing

Where I will never change my house locks just to hear your voice, to hear your lies

You tell me you’ve only written ghost stories. You write them for the living. Of the living. How in the grief you create there is always anger, because somehow you are always part of the forgotten, always the ghost, and all these words, all these stories, are never dedicated to you

And you’re right. These words are not for you. They’re for me, for her, for him, for them, for anyone but you

III. Us

You don’t get to ask me questions anymore. You don’t get to see me mourn or laugh or grow in all the ways I know and don’t know quite yet. You forfeited your sight when you pressed your words into my side and gave them thorns and made them mine to keep and toss and hate:

Why you? Why this? It’s been done. You’ve been done, you will say. 

If I have been done, then each life I have previously lived did not do it the way they should have, nor the way I would have wanted. If I have been done, then you would not have felt the desire to hold me and keep me held still

I love in the ways I know how. And for most of my days, that is more than enough. 

Gia Yetikyel