Precious Battlefields

When did my body become a battlefield

where my mind could play out wars

fought over "yes" and "no" and "fine?"

When did my flesh and blood go from

"I" to "mine" to "yours" to "theirs"

Some days I want to return these bones and their peach-flesh cover

to whence they came.

"Why are you returning this item ma'am?"

"I haven't had it long and it's already used up, worn out, defective."

When did it become a battlefield?

Was it when I thought I understood the meaning of the word love?

Those four letters seemed so fresh, so precious; perfect

I thought I could save him

Instead - my skin, my bones, became his emergency landing.

We had no business dabbling in life and love, past and future.

We had barely lost all of our baby teeth

What we didn't know would come back to haunt us.

Was it a battlefield when I first touched metal to my tender arms?

I thought I understood control that day.

I had a superpower.

The father I once knew could no longer hurt me.

It became my own duty instead.

Was it when she and I became sisters of blood?

A self-destructive pact forged on fear of leaving our wisdom teeth behind.

Not fear of those hunks of bone exactly,

but of having left that preciousness and innocence with our anxious mothers.

We charged ahead full speed

into pills and powders

and shades of grey goose with soda pops.

I thought these elixirs gave my body spirit, vision, originality.

They became our precious loves.

Toxicity seeped into my veins instead.

This war-zone of a body was apparently not so hostile as I imagined.

It turned out I had been sharing it for three months,

a vessel for life; like I had tried to be for outsiders years before.

Was it precious now?

I got to choose.

I chose emptiness.

The doctor made small-talk about the striped minefield my arms had become.

I dropped tears,

the luxury of fleeting moments of singularity,

the echos of an innocence left quiet.

He cried more than my own eyes could muster.

I screamed obscenities at the salt in his eyes.

He didn't deserve to lay a claim on that tiny piece of me

when he was in control of the rest.

Time passes slowly, then quickly.

My body remained the scene of crimes; real and metaphorical.

Puffy, swollen.

It became yours for the price of happy hour and an ear.

Who was I to refuse?

You would shame and blame until my mind judged it safer to exit

in mind only, until the welcoming sunrise.

Body in beds.

Not precious.

Not mine, it seemed.

The time came for me to surrender.

I hoped for one final battle fought from the outside in.

I decided that no part of me was precious.

So it goes.

I awoke in a beeping room

attached to wires and tubes,

violated by safety and breath.

Next time the needles came I eased them into my own weary veins.

I finally gained complete separation from that hunk of peach flesh

that I merely survived in.

Detachment.

Relief - soft, gooey, vague,

unlike the metal blades that still hid under my mattress.

Fifteen dollars.

He put a finite value on that striped skin.

Twenty minutes for an hour of silence in my head.

"I," "mine," "it," "yours."

He noticed the scar tissue graffiti.

He read aloud "junkie."

Six letters that described their host perfectly.

Battles over, no fight left;

totaling the casualties.

I didn't decide that day,

but at some point I made a choice I am still making

with the fresh and relentless sun each day.

A white flag, precious, gleaming;

like my own eyes, at last.