the hurt locker

She kept everything. Not the good things, those she'd misfile, but every slight, every mistimed word, every occasion I'd failed some test I didn't know I was sitting. She could produce the exact wording of a thing I'd said fourteen months prior, with the intonation, and lay it next to whatever I'd just done so I could see the pattern of me forming. The worst superpower. Nothing ever fell off the pile. Each new wound got a shelf and a date.

I keep thinking about the catalogue instead of the girl.

And I curated a gallery. One of them carried so much casual violence from childhood Colombia that it seeped from every pore and stained every angle she looked from, until the last vantage was down, from a tower, in a perfect lacy white dress for the occasion. Another could hear the billboards, they spoke to her, demanding she give up her newborn son, her mania so bright it lit every room you'd forgive the past the way you pardon weather. My sister's descent came through the crock pot, an erotic obsession, she read into where it had been moved on the counter, and not much later the people in the crawlspace she could smell, the smoke, the hacking we'd all done to her phones, the codeword she gave the New York Times so they'd know it was really her.

The drunkle brother-in-law, sotto voce, on the spiritual infestation in the gothic German garage his saviour had kicked him into. The best friend of my childhood, tortured with lithium, gone for months or years then back, briefly, as the luminous kind person you always wished the chemistry would let him stay.

I could go on and that's the problem. It's a real collection. I guess I built it, shelf by shelf.

So it isn't really what's wrong with them, a cowardly thing to ask anyway, dressed as concern. It's the constant. One variable in every frame in the gallery; holding the virtual camera. How stable am I, exactly, that this is the path I've walked and called it love.