Sylvie Too Fast
was how it all happened, the accident,
graduation, the principal
asking me more than once
to give my valedictorian speech
anyway to teach my peers a little thing
about resilience. I couldn’t do it,
knew I’d cry or fly off in my brain
halfway through, stand slack-jawed,
a walking after-school special. Too fast,
late May, my mom babbling on about how strong
I am. The night before I still hadn’t packed
and she came to my room and said, You know,
this can be a journey of healing. I laughed.
I laughed for a long time. I said, I’m not
going to heal. I’m going because it’s harder
than staying here, and I don’t deserve easy
after what I’ve done. My mom tutted,
said, It was an accident, Sylvie, said
opportunity of a lifetime and you’re acting
like the crypt keeper, said I never thought I’d raise
a daughter to be such a killjoy. Killjoy?
Sounded about right. I woke up the next day
with my gun to joy’s head, I checked my van’s
pantry filled with macrobiotic joyless snacks
and The Strategist’s Most Recommended
Camping Gear and I said a punctilious
goodbye to my mom, Botox stone-faced
and weeping tasteful tears, and I drove
hundreds of joyless miles to find myself
alone, just me and my deficiencies, me
and my dog, me nowhere near as helpless
and alone as Cal sprawled out on the ground,
arm flung up, all over blood—but I was trying
to get there. I wanted to be that helpless, that alone.
If I stumbled into happiness somehow
by Knox’s side—wild in the sun, talking all night,
walking the siloed palaces of madmen, together
unspooling all the lies of I’m perfectly fine,
gorgeous boy beside me who listens,
who thinks, who has so many reasons
to hate the world and who loves it anyway—
if that joy allowed me in, after what I’d done,
it was only to teach me how little I deserved it
before it cast me out on the side of the road.
Didn’t leave this summer in one last moonlit moment
in North Carolina, Knox’s hands in my hair.
Left this summer in a Walmart fight. Tonight I found out
the boy I loved was a liar. Found out
how much I hate that, almost as much
as I hate lying. I do it anyway, though.
Have I learned my lesson? I knelt
in the shards of my broken headlight
to hold Cal’s trembling hand. But I don’t want to live there
anymore, kneeling bare-kneed in the glass,
shackled to this thing I’ve done.