nina semen.

i was done.

for so long it’d always seemed worth it. even if i couldn’t explain what exactly was worth anything, i felt it. down in my soul, in the depths of my very being, i had to have him, be his. sure, after some fights i’d yell that i was finished with it; nod in agreement with everyone that told me i was better off.

then…i’d go back. i’d follow my heart. or perhaps it’s better to say that i’d return to my heart, because it never left him. no matter how he treated it: if he stamped on it or stabbed it or squeezed every drop from it, it was his. 

eventually though, there was nothing left for me. my skin didn’t shiver against his fingertips. the thought of him in love or inside of someone else didn’t upset me.

what did it take? my friends ask. i don’t know. i don’t know what happened. it’s not that i realized that i deserved better: i was well aware of that, long prior. and i loved myself, i know i did - i don’t feel any differently about who or what i am now than i did back then. i just…i loved him.

i was in love with him. 

and then one day i wasn’t. and it was the best day of my life. 

i had lost him and every time i thought about it my stomach would lurch and i’d find it hard to breathe and an ache - an actual, not just literal, ache - would form in my chest, so severe that i would clutch at my breasts and whimper into the pillows of the bed i refused to leave. i’d writhe around in the sheets, hoping that if wrestled myself under them far enough maybe i’d find him again, tan and freckled and warm and lean and he’d turn me on my side and slip his arm under my neck and and drape a leg over my hip and we’d sleep and everything would be fine. but he wasn’t there anymore; the bed was as empty as i felt my soul to be.

my phone would ring, my heart would spring into my throat and then drop into my pelvis. i was afraid to look at the screen, i wanted to avoid the disappointment. it was never him.

i slept a lot. i played nothing but The Cure and The Smiths and Joy Division. i was sad: i wanted to be sad. why on earth would anyone want to be anything else at a time like this? the world had ended. my world had, at least. i didn’t eat. i couldn’t eat. the thought of food made me nauseous. what was the point? maybe i could just starve to death. death would be less cruel than my life. my subsistence. 

in the shower i had a panic attack; the first one of my life. my shrink loaded me with high dosage prescriptions to all sorts of things people get addicted to like valium and xanax. none of it worked, no matter how much i wished it would. my body’s natural high tolerance of medications, fucking me over once again. it helped to talk to her, and she set aside an hour to talk with me. she gave me no hope, only clarity. i had no hope. i was angry at myself, for allowing myself to care so much, for pretending for so long that i didn’t care at all. so long that he tired of it, and left.

tucked away in the corner of town is my great uncle’s old house. he’d lived in it since the day he was born. he’s dead now; he was schizophrenic. my great aunt - his older sister - said he came back from the war like that. apparently he’d been fine before. anyway, he went particularly nuts one night and jumped out of a three story window thinking something was after him. a demon or something.

the house has a rusty tin roof; the wood it’s built from is grey; the porch sags. can’t live in it, but i visit ever so often, just because. it’s a good place to think. it’s in the far back of a cotton field that no one tends to anymore, overgrown with brown and green, little bits of white speckled throughout it like dandruff. when i visit my dogs like to delve through it, chasing whatever animals they find until they come back to me, moping, with thorns and pricklers stuck in the fur.

past the field, before the house, at the edge of the yard is a white oak tree that my uncle called the lynching tree.

he said one night, when he was young, the white man that owned the farm his daddy worked on and some of his white friends strung up a black boy from it for not saying sir. that white man had been nothing but nice to our family, he said, and they thought he was fine, as far as white folk went, until that night.

that night they sat in their house, my uncle and his parents and his dozen siblings, including my great grandfather, crouched in the kitchen windows and watched that fine white man - that had treated his black father fairly and was always kind to his Cherokee mother - kick that boy in his ribs and laugh at him pleading for his life and murder him.

he said that after it happened his mother begged his father to cut that tree down, but he refused and that when he asked his daddy why, he just looked down at him with ice in eyes and told him “it’s to make sure ya’ll never forget. you can’t trust a white man as far as you can toss him, ‘less you plan on gettin’ hanged.”

i don’t know if the story is true or something the crazy in him invented. i never asked anyone else in the family: it seemed distasteful.

sometimes in the fall i’ll take people to that house and show them that tree. i rarely tell the macabre tale but i point out how when all the other trees’ leaves start whittling down and turning yellow and orange and brown, this one’s turn a deep shade of burgundy, almost like the red of deoxygenated blood.

he handed me a piece of yellow paper when he saw me. it’d been folded over so many times it looked ready to explode. on it he’d scribbled down the lyrics to you are my sunshine. i smiled.

years later, i came across it in a box at the back of my closet. i’d forgotten he was capable of such sweet things. i smiled again, dropped it in the trashcan. it was no longer something i needed to hold onto.

i was over being willing to settle for little, expecting even less.

he pulls the collar of my shirt down, exposing my shoulder. tilts my head, bites my neck, flicks his tongue lightly over me. leaning back, hips still tilted forward into my stomach, he traces his fingertips over the words needled into the thin skin across my clavicle.

“what’s this say?” he asks softly.

“only after disaster can we be resurrected.” i answer and he looks down, eyes scattering from side to side in thought. he mutters that it sounds familiar.

“it’s a line from Fight Club,” i say, “the book, not the film.”

he nods in recognition. “it’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.” i nod in response. i want to fuck him even more now.

i stand on my tiptoes, lift my chin, catch his pillowy lips between my own. the stubble on his chin hurts. i love it. i grab the front of his jeans; he sucks in air sharply, holds me tighter. my tits flatten against his abdomen, he slides one hand down to squeeze my ass, the other into the front of my underwear. his fingers find the wetness, i feel him smile against me.  

“i love that book.” he says into my mouth, tongue still twisting around mine. i moan, weakly.