lindseybethwrites

[lindseybethwrites]

Leave the door open

not another love letter!

My dog used to scratch at the door, on the rare occasion I closed it completely. He was tender, and golden-brown, and prone to hiccupping. So if I was on deadline — and I took my deadlines seriously, even at fourteen — the lock was latched. If I didn’t answer after the first scratch or the tenth, he would wiggle his wet nose under the door and whine into the room. There are few sounds so compelling.

All these years later and I am still on deadline, typing away at some make-believe shit in the far corner of my bed. The fan is on. I look at the door, listening for a scratch that hasn’t come in ten years. I wait for it anyway. Then crack open the door and let him inside.

If I look at my life objectively, as though it were a mosaic in a Garden of Self-Realization or something hocus-pocus like that, there are thousands of micro-behaviors traceable to someone. Straight lines, red ink. There are, very probably, a few thousand more connections and credits that I can’t make, only because my memory is well short of photographic.

Aunt Edie makes that face.

Uncle Bud offers me a beer before I can take off my shoes.

Dawn leans in close in the middle of a loud party and tells me a secret.

Dad bristles at the sound of a bad laugh.

Mom throws her head back when she laughs.

Lauren laughs a lot.

It’s hardly limited to family, though they get the most credit. A month ago, my only friend with a kid mentioned a book on wicca’s role in motherhood. The book lives on my nightstand, dog-eared from weeks spent crushed up against who knows what in my backpack. I don’t see my friend as often as I did when we were both single, but I get to look at her every time I turn off the lamp, and carry her on my back whenever I need a companion during the grey hours of a graveyard shift.

How many horses have I met, and run with, run faster because of? I have sat with millions of blades of grass and thought, “Let me breathe that way.” The limit to the world’s influence over me is incalculable. It is happening now, in every neuron that fires to type out the words I read back to myself in a voice stolen from a beautiful girl I have never met in real life. She runs a podcast; I’m pretty sure she lives in New York. She will never know the hundreds of hours she has spent narrating my unfamiliar life, from the internal hallway of my head.

I am the first to admit love. I think we owe it to each other, this little kindness. It is never offensive to hear that someone thinks of us in their spare time.

Once, I told a friend that I had deeper feelings for him. And by told him, I mean bought him a postcard in northern Italy, wrote a letter — in cursive — by lamplight confessing that I dreamt of him during my famed comatose state, spritzed it with perfume, and handed it to him in a room full of mutuals.

He didn’t feel the same way.

Obviously.

This level of intensity is reserved for prison guards.

We laughed about it. Years later, we’re at a barbecue, laughing about some other embarrassing thing, and he thanks me for not making things awkward in perpetuity. I tell him no thanks is necessary, but I want to say, Of course, I would never do that. I love you.

Not in that way, please. I’m not hopeless.

The shape is changed, but the commitment still stands. My love for someone is not contingent on their equal and exact feelings for me. I love them in spite of the hurt, distance, momentary strangeness. It is loyal, a choice, that I make over and over again despite. His book is still on my shelf.

I squint my eyes.

Offer you a beer.

Lean in close, confess.

Leave when it gets too loud.

Laugh with my neck back.

Often.

These are dedications to those we cannot keep on our shelves.

I always leave the door open.

[lindseybethwrites]

rawest fucking hozier lyrics in no particular order:

i’d suffer hell if you’d tell me what you’d do to me tonight

heat of her breath in my mouth; im alive

i’d be the choiceless hope in grief that drove him underground

idealism sits in prison, chivalry fell on his sword

and when the earth is trembling on some new beginning with the same sweet shock of when adam first came

every version of me dead and buried in the yard outside

the stench of the sea and the absence of green are the death of all things that are seen and unseen

if I was born as a blackthorn tree i’d wanna be felled by you, held by you, fuel the pyre of your enemies

some like to imagine the dark caress of someone else, I guess any thrill will do

before the wave hits, marveling at god; before he feels alone one final time and marries the sea

betray the moon as acolyte on first and fierce affirming sight

i have never known peace like the damp grass that yields to me, I have never known hunger like these insects that feast on me

screaming the name of a foreigner’s god; the purest expression of grief

sweet and right and merciful, i’m all but washed in the tide of her breathing

but you don’t know the hell you put me through; to have someone kiss the skin that crawls from you

so i try to talk refined for fear that you find out how i’m imagining you

my head was war, my skin was soaked, I called your name ‘til the fever broke

be still, my indelible friend, you are unbreaking

remember me, love, when i’m reborn as a shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn