Esoteric

This is something I wrote about having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I wrote it in Poetry class. It's supposed to be read to the guy I was dating at the time I was diagnosed with PTSD.

Esoteric

(es·o·ter·ic)adj. Intended for or understood by only a particular group.
Of or relating to that which is known by a restricted number of people.

You discovered,
eventually,
the secrets I kept.

Then your face twisted
with the knowledge of a year.
You touched my forehead
to picture it pressed
to the damp window
overlooking an alley,
my lips moving with ineffective prayer.
When your fingers rested on my neck
there was extravagance
in the press and release,
the silent reassurance that
air still flowed in my lungs.

Dreams of burning meat
and the empty voices of women in wheelchairs
slid into the reality of you
with your blue eyes
and serious smile, your childhood overseas,
your conservative father and sick sister,
your breath that froze in the air
after the first time you kissed me.
To wake with you above me, love,
that was the childhood I emptied into small, orange bottles,
the friends that I'd lost
to missed days and lies,
and the ones I couldn't forgive
for asking me to hang on
when I wanted to fall, forever.

Your eyes, when he called,
were like storms at sea.
My boat marooned in the ocean
we'd look into together
one day
somewhere else.
The length of the call
was the only time I could
discern me from you,
the only time you looked at me
like I was something less than
precious.

Worse were the
flashbacks
that pressed the air against me in
full color and sound,
small memories of dark hallways
lined with screen doors that
never faded from the sun.
Your hands rescued me,
when I crouched in the hallway
my hair curtaining my face.
Later, you said my eyes were wide
and unfocused
when you tilted my chin.
I told you that such was life,
so you pulled me closer.

You push too hard
when I barely try.
And my chest gets so tight
that I chew aspirin,
wincing against the crumbled glide
of white powder between my teeth,
even when they tell me
my blood is thinning
and the iron is low
like low-quality steak
or someone’s discarded easel.
They say it’s all in my head
and I told them I’d heard that cliché
until I wanted my ears to hemorrhage.
Then when you moved your hands over me
I saw alternating handprints,
green and black
against the stark white skin.

You cried the day
she warned of long-term nightmares.
Your eyelashes spiked
while you beat yourself for not protecting me
before you knew me,
and all I could think was
that your hands were tanner than mine,
that I’d never had a callus.
It was the only time I’d hear your breath
shiver wetly on the inside,
the way leaves rattle in the autumn rain.

At night you’d cover me
like you could protect me from the world
or myself.
But you slept
without reverie,
like pictures in closed albums,
unless I stirred or cried out,
buried in dreams of medicine cabinets with
broken mirrors above rotting tile,
and a bathtub that groaned its
appetite for blood.