The Girl Who Cut [Split Screen Selves]

By

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a broken girl.        Trauma    tends to cut into people.

It leaves them fragmented.                                 There has never been a shortage of trauma.

I began splitting myself when the world began to divide like a freshly implanted egg.   Inside of metal boxes and deeper still inside of tiny soldered circuit boards, a new existence was born.            Nucleotides split, new selves, birthed.

At nine,

BXMAMI99 [at] aol.com

At fifteen,

EviL PsYcHo MaMi [at] aol.com

At nineteen,

Hollywood [at] myspace.com

These girls lingered,                         like so many lonely boys and girls on forgotten summer afternoons, in moving rooms. They watched the waves from behind a humming monitor. Doors slammed open and shut. Age, sex, and locations glowed red, open for a connection. They were all so hungry for the cry of a 56k modem bond. They stood up late. They watched sunrise with strangers. The lonely boys told lonelier girls secrets. There were so many secrets. There were so many half-truths. There were so many names   b l i n k i n g across windows.

We grew up — on the internet. Or maybe we grew up //in// the internet.

____________________________

I shed each name like a chrysalis.     Each handle, a new way to enter the world.

Natalie        hid behind a water bottle filled with beer in class. She was scared of speaking, and so she got buzzed to talk. She wrote papers tipsy, too.   Her hands trembled in the flesh and blood spaces. Her finger tips went blue, pressed tightly against the things she had read and reread.               She knew her mouth
opening  up meant sneers,    she was usually   too close to drunk to care. She raised her hand anyway. She went up on stage anyway. She ate rejections like the petals that she pulled off carnations her grandmother brought back from funerals. She liked the taste of almost dying.

scatteredstanza, was born when no one was looking. She didn’t know what her voice sounded like. She carried stones in her mouth and waited for time make them less heavy.   Time only grew moss around dead leaves.  When the floods came and drowned the girl who drank too much, Scattered swallowed the stones. They were heavy in her belly but there was no other way out. There is usually no other way. There is never another way.     Scatteredstanza     wanted to be light and so she  stuck her index down her throat and wrote the heavy down at the hospital. She told the doctors where to find the rest. Gloved hands pulled out all the things that she wasn’t strong enough to dig out herself.    Flowers bloomed in the places that had grown barren.

Post Modern THOT came when the voices came; the ones that tried to suffocate and scare.    She was braver than all of  them. She was angrier that all of them. She was smarter than all of them.      She didn’t care about their feelings.     There was only pure thought ;   years of academic institutionalization and fury    – steady hands and hard-line mouth,         she had learned to aim the razor in the opposite direction.

_______________________

We’d been cut for a long time.

//the internet showed us how//

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