yours and mine, somehow intertwined

there are days when he turns one and he has that wild shock of blonde hair and i turn twenty-four and i relive all the painfully living lessons and he chases me on his big motorcycle and his shame makes him disappear and he looks at me with his soft eyes while he carries his injured child away, just checking to make sure i was still all right that i need a hole, not bloodied, and i need to learn to just let it go.

privacy is still a fucking barrier, whether he chooses to believe it or not. the justification for his fortress frightens me. the weapons i wield are invisible, yet he dons armor with the same vigilance as if i were brandishing them in his face. something that i do keeps him shrouded, occasionally initiates the molding of new bricks.

will marriage make our differences coalesce, or will the years just teach us to lie a little sooner, harder, better?

erased

she turned eight and not a single picture to show it. for once in my life, i lived in the moment, forgetting to capture it for posterity, forgetting to freeze it to hold onto for the rest of my life. so i could remember my little blonde girl and her impish gleam. i'm turning twenty-four and there will be nothing to show it. just another year.
her visit has yanked me a million directions. she is so much bigger, better than i was at that age. she knows already that the real solution is to just throw rocks, that everything else, no matter the strength of the fantastical facade, is ultimately pretty useless. apart from tremendous cultural ousting, there's not much we can do. so many parts of her are gorgeous, but some require further fostering. i hope she finds it somewhere; she'll have to wade through a lot of shit on her own, which, in ways, makes me feel like i've abandoned her at the time i needed someone to apply my eyeliner, adjust my mini, hand me a condom and tell it to me straight the most. so much of her is me nine years earlier. the pictures i have of her visit last year are nothing like the pictures i'll have to remember this visit. the pictures will show that in a short twelve-month period, my little sister transformed from girl to pseudo-woman, not terribly unlike the pictures i have of myself, but just as fucking frightening.
twenty years earlier is as far as i can remember: his neon orange knit hat and the bathtub with claws, water streaming down the walls and tears always streaming down her cheeks, the wooden screen door slamming and fear that the big bird would carry me, berrylike, away. there's a picture of me, bonneted, on the front porch with the dog.
nineteen years earlier, he chased after me because i was the only friend he'd ever known and he couldn't bear to relinquish me to the trailer park girls with their pink barbie bikes and their dingy dolls; i was his bubba and he had to be involved. annoyed and already craving independence from the males in my world, i slammed his hand hard in the door. blood trickled down and i ran away, giggling with my new friends. five years old and already a traitor. there's a picture of me in a pink party hat, glaring at him in his thick glasses and