I Was an Empire - 4. Death & Girls

I knew there were things I was never supposed to love
like death,
and girls.

Last year my New Year’s resolution was to go to therapy.
I had never been,
because the last time I had spoken to a mental health professional
I was only nineteen, and crying in the student union bathroom.
“Are you having thoughts of suicide?” they asked.
“Are you a danger to yourself?”
And I replied honestly that I didn’t really want to die—
I just wanted to be dead.

Instead of offering a temporary solution
to my permanent problem, they said:
The only crisis you’re allowed to have
is a knife to your wrist,
or a gun to your head,
and if you’re swallowing that poison past your lips
there’s a place for you,
but if you just never want to get up again—
there’s an appointment, three months away
see if you can hold on to that rope long enough for us to pull you up,
or if you’ll give in and hang yourself with it.

I was the lie of the bystander effect
at the side of my own bed.
Surely someone else would call 911 if I deserved it,
because Kitty Genovese was just misrepresented by the media,
so when you Google her all you get is her funeral,
how she was untouchable,
not the life of a queer Italian woman in 1960’s America,
not how she was held as she was bleeding, hot copper
not the two who called for help to come,
3 AM the lights—
cool blue and warm, blood red.

But that’s not the kind of thing that’s good enough
to be commercially collectible pain,
the poster girl on tabloids
the subject of our tragic study—
and just like that, I’m back to therapy.

I told him:
I’m not here to romance suicide;
I fucking knew it would get better.
And I don’t want people to say:
If you google her, all you’ll get is her funeral,
not the life of a queer Italian woman in 2017 America,
whose body is no longer that untouchable exclusion zone,
who keeps her resolutions—

I like to think I’m better now.
But I know there are some things you cannot change,
like loving death,
and loving girls.