I feel like an interruption. Like a gnarly cough during an important meeting. One you try to hold in, swallow, but then it burns and it itches. It squirms until it screams its way out. That cough is me.

I am learning that how I am perceived–or misperceived–has become the fuel to my writing.

I knew it was over by the way she started to kiss me. She used to treat my mouth like a rest stop. She’d park her tongue between my lips for hours. Seizure it around, clean my teeth, zigzag from cheek to cheek, waterslide down my throat. Her kisses were like a season pass to Great Adventure.

On the day my breasts were removed, the sun hitchhiked up the sky.

When you feel unsafe, build a metaphor out of your body and watch it become something else. A cash register. A rent payment. An elevator. A garbage bag. A potato chip. A chalk outline on the sidewalk people walk over and the rain removes. A tumbleweed of hair. A cigar box full of scabs and fingernail clippings. A broken seatbelt. A discarded subway map.

Why do you have so many scars, asks the third generation to the second.

Because I have lived, the second replies. But what they do not add is that each scar is from a different war within the body and mind. Some truths are not able to be told until. Until. When?

“Language always has an important role in day-to-day life, whether we’re going through a pandemic like this or we’re not. Words are one way in which we can create bridges toward each other and create these alphabetical band-aids to make us feel as though, okay I can get through this hour, I can get through this day…Language is going to save us, in every way.”

I am trying to articulate and wrap my understanding around the words I want to ask others not to use on me. What if we could carry a tiny index card in our pockets and on this card were the words that make us feel invisible, incorrectly seen, or just simply cause us to cringe. And by just carrying these words in our pocket, that ink becomes so powerful that it creates a…force field…an electromagnetic barrier making it impossible for these words to be spoken in our presence.

I learned that the color of a bruise is synonymous to the sky right before a storm. And just like the sky, the body can thunder and lightening itself until it is unrecognizable.