throwing up

I told the babies I had to take a bath. And I went upstairs and locked the door. Undressed. Put in the tea tree salty stuff. Stood and looked in the mirror for a long time. I had stopped brushing my teeth two days ago. That's why I needed to bathe. I'm perpetually filthy. It doesn't wash off. But I can ignore it until my teeth are dirty. Then I'm aware of how filthy I really am.  So it's bath time. But the mirror stops me.

I glanced back at my naked body and it made me stop and so I stared at the ugly belly from carrying around a too big baby. The belly that stretched so much it tore open in the last few weeks of pregnancy. And remember being 15 and looking down at my flat belly in the shower and being thankful that I was "pretty." I stared at the black under my eyes that wouldn't go away. It came out of nowhere two years ago and it won't leave. It tells on me.I looked at the mouth that pleased so many strangers, and how dirty it was and how it would always be dirty and couldn't stop staring at it and thinking about what it had done to take care of those babies. I looked at it a long time. I got that mouth from my daddy. And it made me cry that the gift he gave me was so ugly and full of filth. So I got in the bath.

I scrubbed. My ugly unpainted toes, and cried. I deliberately shaved, and scrubbed more. Until my brown skin turned red with the effort of my long, long fingers to try to get the ugly and gross off of me. And my silent crying turned into sobs and I put my head on my naked thighs and silently wailed. The water ran and I cried to my dead daddy and opened my eyes to my scarred arms.

Last week the husband I didn't love kicked me out of our home and it was cold and I gave up. The next day I sent my babies to school and drove to a truck stop and ate whatever pills I'd gathered the night before as  the clock told me I had 10 minutes to take what I could find and go. I put on my big sun glasses and walked in and it was funny because all the men in line moved five giant steps backwards as I walked in in my black that I always wore and found some box cutter blades and paid my $2.49 to the happily oblivious Indian guy behind the counter and went back to my car at the very back of the parking lot. And I casually ate those pills at the back of the truck stop at the top of a mountain and screamed at the top of my lungs. I don't know why I didn't die.

Then I drove back to the house I was kicked out of and dared him to make me leave again and barely held on as I hid my bleeding arms from the babies and cooked dinner.

Tonight I sit again in the bath tub w/the two-dollar box cutter blades and slowly slice at the thighs slick from bath salt and shaving. I watch the superficial dermis open up. And slice slowly through fat. I am an anatomist. And the dark, dark ugly comes pouring out and it feels tremendously beautiful. I squeeze and watch it flow into the dirty bath water where it belongs. And slice some more. No one can know. There is no tourniquet because the hurting is what stops the flow of the pain and I can't make myself die because I don't want to go to hell and I can't live with this because I don't want to go to hell. So it cut it open and watch the dirty ugly moderately slide out of my thighs where no one will see it because they're not allowed to know my failure. And I close my eyes.
I'm clean. Except for my teeth, and it's driving me crazy. Stand up. Let the dirty go down out of the house down through the pipes. away. and turn on the shower, cold. to wash my hair. the dirty keeps coming out of me but it's pink now so I know it's safe to wash my hair and get out and let my thighs close up until the next time.
i was born 30 years ago in a blizzard. almost in alabama. but not quite. to another, less obvious whore. and i am a real whore. my daddy died and my mama left to go consummate the last whore deal she made before she couldn't walk anymore. and i took up the torch and started stripping in a little boxy building outside the gates of an army base when I was 18.. i'm good at love. i can love you to life. ive done it for so many. the walking dead like me that i can see right thru that tell me their secrets and fall in love because i know when no one else knows. i'm a real whore. it's not a self-deprecating phrase, i sell me, to make it. i sell the gift of love, i make it filthy, to make you better. there have been thousands. i do it to make you better and make me better so the babies never know this pain and the torch can go out and rot in the cold snow somewhere close to alabama where it was born in that blizzard 30 years ago.

this is the truth. i have to make it go away. i have to get rid of it, and give it away to someone or something else. and know that i was honest. because i lie. i lie.