Ink

Some days,
my midlife crisis
comes to life in the permanent markings
of crisp black and blue ink,
flowing between the finely-dotted lines
of the five-by-seven pages
in my craft-paper notebook.

Each letter that appears
is the legacy of a pen I stole
from a former version of myself,
back before I knew the words
I was writing were never my own.

Other days,
my midlife crisis
is a string of poorly-punctuated,
asynchronous Instagram DMs
discussing the thickness and theology
of a six-year-old scar.

In curious screenshots and sentence fragments,
we casually debate whether its jagged pink body
is ripe enough
to handle another round
of self-inflicted damage,
this time of my own delicate and deliberate design.

One Wednesday morning,
my midlife crisis
is a ten-am bite
from a one-inch,
lime green, sugar-flecked square,
gently slipping me into seven glorious hours
of full-bodied surrender I don’t fully remember,
though I can still feel its womb-like warmth
radiating across my skin.

And in the screenplay of an episode
that will never be written,
my midlife crisis
is a ten-dollar pair of black lace fishnets,
feverishly peeled-off in a four-hundred-dollar hotel room
by a set of hands that have no script
or stage notes to follow.

Locked in the margins of my imagination,
this indiscretion is a twisted permission
to be more explicitly myself
and yet more purposefully someone else
than I know how to hold,
pieces of each persona breaking free
between the bedsheets and bodyheat
of a secret afternoon.

Every inch of these scenes
leaves an indelible mark on my walls,
a burgeoning collage of souvenirs
from unexpected trips outside of my borders.

I am not ashamed to be
collecting them like stamps,
curiously turning them over and over
between my fingertips,
interpreting their soft ridges and hard edges
as a map of my own.

Their saturated colors stand proudly;
their hues never wondering if they’re too much,
or not enough, for the purposeful space they inhabit.

Their mid-life crisis—
simply isn’t.

They’re in cosmic synchronicity
with the way things are,
accepting that what’s next
doesn’t have to be known
to be loved.

If these brilliantly-colored inks
can bleed just one pregnant drop
into the pages of my craft-paper notebook,
I think I can find my way back
to the words that are mine,
and to the pen that will translate
my black and blue letters
into shades of sunlit gold.