Corner
I am startled by the sound of my own voice. The strength that it has when my blood is pounding, when my core is tight, when my legs are two and a half foot pillars of indignation, when i lose my own sense of propriety in the face of something terrifying, or exciting. I am startled by the low tone that my anger often takes, by the vibration in my own chest of unreleased bullets from my mouth. My anger is palpable and strong, it lays under my skin like a heating blanket. I can feel the fluid in my veins, thick and wet, as it sloshes around my guts and my brain, the throb of a pulse keeping my life together like a metronome of intensity.
Sometimes I am loud.
And then, in the night, under the blankets and away from the monsters. My squeaky little girl whisper is so soft and pitiful that I can barely hear my own tiny murmurs to the night and the angels. I can almost make out the consonants in the dark, and feel the cool whoosh of vowels in the palm of my hand. No one knows my prayers and peace offerings, even when I try. I am the only audience for the symphony of my fears and my needs and my heartbreaks. Only in this space created between my knees and chin and hip bones and collar bones, only here does this weak sad person get to exist. This child that my therapist tells me is critical to empathy, to compassion, to trust. This idiot little piece of broken dreams that I cannot manage to leave in the county fair parking lot no matter how many times I walk down the lanes of memory. She stays with me.
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The heat of the kitchen, it is thick and humid and painful to the touch. The fire and the knives and the speed and the smoke. It is a heady mix of smells, of flavors, the air itself sparkles with burning alcohol and popping fat. There is a mysticism that comes off the flat top around 8 o'clock, when the world has ceased to spin, when the clock has frozen, when the sole purpose of your existence boils down to a perfectly au sec moment of pressure and push and perfection. The pieces of the robot colliding together through sheer force of will, the plates flying and not crashing, the drops of sweat hitting the top of a clog instead of the red eye hole center of the duck balanced on the edge of a knife. Everything is balanced on the edge of a knife right now. We dance with the devil, he waits in the alley behind the restaurant to pull our teeth from our jaws and our nails from our hands. He tastes like cheap whiskey and yesterdays family meal and a half smoked cigarette.
