I’ve only been fist deep in two women, and the first time it wasn’t my fist exactly but my whole body. I’ve only ever been fully encapsulated inside two women and the first time, it was on purpose by nature of biology. You know, the way somebody gets born after sex instead of during it. The way somebody gets born as a result of sex instead of getting born again through a series of tiny deaths. The second time, the second way of living and dying through sex, I was so close to her I’d had her IUD strings wrapped around my fingers and her red hair got woven into my sweaters. Last winter, we were together. This winter, I’ve been pulling every titian strand out when I see it. Even in the cold Cleveland freeze, I roll my car window down every time I find one and release it. I truly hope there are birds out there making redheaded nests.
After the tiny deaths came a larger one, a death to self instead of an awakening into it. Or maybe it was the avalanche of tiny deaths that accumulated into a larger one, the way that snow falls and builds until a roof caves in. I was dying, I know this for sure, when I broke up with her. I like to ask myself, “Do you remember how much you were drinking?” If only because the answer, “No, I was drinking too much to remember,” feels darkly amusing and amusingly illuminating at the same time. We were always drunk on each other, and the hopeless generosity I assign to us at this time has more to do with my ability to blame myself than the actual blame someone else might assign to me. Or to her. Or to us.
That night, she threw open my door and pressed the side of her body against me. I was sitting at the end of my bed like The Thinker, contemplating the horror of a life where I might be responsible for myself and be able to do what I like to do. This evidently horrified her too. We had been Best Friends Forever for six or seven years by now and dating for only one, yet, with her body threatening to tip mine over and her own heart pitching from side to side, she wailed, “Everyone in my life leaves me. They always leave me.” There are a million stories, episodes of Friends, paintings, plays, and poems about the simple truth that romantically breaking up is bad for the underlying friendship. I didn’t want to believe this and offered up my foolish optimism the only way I knew how: angrily. “If I am leaving you now, if it is Leaving You to not date you, then what are we doing here?” I remember how hoarse my voice was, galloping faster in front of me than our future plans could. We were simply outrun.
The aftermath was beautiful. Well, first it was ashes settling and ashtrays overflowing and bottles of wine. I was still drunk on her and the dream we had about flowers and dirt. I was still drunk on the idea that I could love two people at the same time since we all lived together, and I was drunk because I was A Drunk. But when the wine ran out and I threw away a pack of cigarettes that was only half-gone, I knew my tongue and my fingers and my lungs and my third eye were my own again. And my god, I can see for ages. Everything laid bare to vision: her red hair, her wide eyes, the penchant for antiques that would (and did) pile high without resale, her own ill-prepared childhood, the codependent heart that met a match in me, my own lighting of that match, her fanning of the fire. The copper leather armchair that became a dog bed years after we moved it into our first shared apartment, my dog allergy that abated with enough exposure. I see so clearly now how one can get used to anything. That sometimes we have to unclench the fist to pull it free, how I had to let go of pleasing her in order to feel pleased myself. We were entirely wrapped up in each other, we were tangled like hairs in a sweater, one pull at a red string and the rest of it unravels.
I may not remember much of the time we shared together because of the ways we twisted our vision through bottles of liquids and the haze of smoke but I was still developing, half inside and half outside the world as it would come to be for me. We have no contact. We are not close. The silence between us is the silence of the womb. I don’t remember my first birth either, and yet I’m still glad most days that it happened. I once spent a year waking up early just to walk into her room and wrap my body around her. This year I have spent mornings laying in my own damn bed, plucking hairs, feeling relieved. I have sex and hair and freedom and fire enough for myself, for my husband, for the tree house we moved into: our own blonde nest. The new thing to be inside. A home to be contained by. The way things got born after all, all blood and hot breath and then: the unmistakable scent of newness on the skin.
Eileen Winn is an agender poet from Cincinnati, a 2014 graduate from the University of Dayton, and currently residing in Cleveland, Ohio. They are an avid reader, lover of burnt popcorn, and the poetry editor of Roam Lit Magazine. Without purple pens, much of their work would not exist. Their work can be found at we1rdmuseum.wordpress.com and on Twitter @weirdmuseum.