Puppet

Fall quarter fourth year, walk to the library

Let my brain run for four hours

I want to learn everything

I don’t want to relax

I want to be perfect

Feels like my body is a furnace,

Feels like I am inside out,

Feelings, feelings, mercy!

My jaw is clenched and maybe I should just go home

Why can’t I write anymore?
The words used to flow out of me like water.

When he found me I was still so full of something

pain and youth

poetry and music

I was full of it

When he found me I was a girl unconfined

I was seeing color for the first time

I wish I had gotten more time

Fall quarter second year

It was like standing blinded under a bright spotlight 

and falling in love with the relief of looking out into the darkness it cast

all at once he was both the light source and the darkness

He was a house I wanted to live in

It was like being stuffed with fingers again and again

until I became a puppet

until I laid ever limp,

Waiting for a hand to be put inside me

Waiting to be brought to life

When he found me I was carrying with me

this roaring fire he would not step away from

I didn’t think I could burn him

I didn’t know what to think

I think I wanted to let him love me

I think I didn’t want to wait

And then all at once I loved him
I loved him like breathing

Restless, desperate, unworthy, loved him.

All of a sudden a puppet was all I had ever been

I needed his hand inside of me to be something

Without him I was nothing

Inanimate, immobile, invisible

I loved him and it ruined me

Fall quarter third year

Pointless in the middle of Paris

My brain felt like a deflated balloon

Waiting for an email, waiting for a purpose

My love for him was a heavy ghost I carried around on my back.

It was just that I refused to let my mind step away from our last moment

I stayed in one place hoping he would come back

I would have stayed a puppet forever but I don’t think that was ever what he wanted

My inactive soul began to spoil

My skin boiled under the spotlight

No one was there to watch the show

I rotted and the love rotted with me. 

When he came back he saw the damage

He tried to dust me off

It wasn’t his fault

The puppet undignified who stayed laying on the ground

At the time I wanted him to know that he could torment and degrade me and I would still love him but now I think that I was really sick

Fall quarter fourth year, library

I want to be perfect

I want to be valued. I want respect.

If it’s over then I can leave this desperate obsessive love behind

But once I prove to myself that I am still the same girl I was before

What will I want to do next?

I am still carrying around all this love for him

I have nowhere to put it.

I am at his mercy, still.