Allison's Archives

The slate is clean but the same cannot be said for my hands. You have no idea the kind of flood it took to get me here. The kind that skipped over everyone’s bed but mine; the kind whose violence is selective at best, blind at worst.

I was perfectly content—drowning with my back against the sun, my hair floating on the surface of the water as if it had always belonged there—but you had to place your grip on my skin and turn me over until I was face up for the world to see, until my last breath couldn’t escape into the water. Your justification, that I must pay for my sins, is unjustified on the grounds that I have already paid. Yet, you insist that repentance requires a witness and that witness must be you.

My limbs thrash around as you bring me back to land for reprimand. My limbs, just as my words, are borrowed, soon to be returned. Au secours, let me return them! I plead and I beg and the ink bleeds out of my heels. Yes, I am incapable of my own distress, but I refuse to pass it onto someone else—this you do not understand or, rather, refuse to understand. 

You tell me there is no sympathy for those who try to walk into the river with no intent of return. You tell me you are exhausted from the wound I had inflicted, as if the act of stabbing did not also demand effort. On the knife sits both our fingerprints. In the river sits both our bloods. The water will run through our town and everyone will wail at the tragedy as if an an angel had been maimed. There will only be one villain in their unified minds. How is one to defend oneself in a room already filled with verdicts? The truth that circulates is polished enough to draw blood but not reflection. I rest my rebuttals on a laurel I’ve made out of my bones:

If I am spiteful, I have to have learned it somewhere. If I am dishonest, someone must have had to siphon the frankness out of me. If I am hollow, it is because I was carved out of the space where no one waited. The handle of the axe was once part of the forest it now slaughters. Still, you demand repentance. Which grave do I visit to be punished and therefore reborn? How many tears must I shed until one washes the taste of bitterness off your tongue? Which wound do I flay to show you that I, too, bleed? If you cannot tell me, for why do you despise me? 

The sky still refuses to respond and the water beckons me to seek answers in its currents, but you deprive me of this reckoning. If you won’t let me go quietly, I cannot be charged for the peal that comes thereafter. There can be more than one lamb to the slaughter! I like to say that I am only the firstborn but I have never come first in anything else in my life (much less the first to be listened to, why do you think I write?), but it seems I am also the first to cradle the blame.

When is it someone else’s turn to be forgiven? When is it no one’s turn to be forgiven? Your name stays on the front page headline. Mine is in the obituary. The printer had conveniently malfunctioned while it was printing my cause of death. Good. Never mind. The people want the writer’s stories but never the writer’s story. Good. Keep your tally lined. Let that ledger eclipse the ledger of who hurt me.

You still refuse to let me go face down. If you have to turn me face up, ask! I thirst not for forgiveness but for curiosity. The former is easier to spare, but granting me the latter requires you to be in the water with me, sacrificing your comfortable warmth of the land. You’ve done it before, but now that the townsmen are on the same land watching, your step hesitates. So I swallow my tongue to keep the peace and I let the blue fill my lungs. 

From the river where poets go to die, I watch you try to pull me out of the water, saving my last breath for later. I watch you wipe the slate clean.