Ribbed

You may be able to count my ribs. If we press through the fat to count yours, not one will be missing. I gave it back. I gave them all back: the rib, the ribs, the ring, the ringing in my ears.

I would have given Eden to be your shadow. I was thirty-five already when we met, lush with my curly-tailed community and my earnest oddball job. I loved God and people and my 700-square-foot apartment. My mother was my best friend, and I raised over a million dollars a year to save cats. I had hair long enough to sit on. I hatched plans with the moon and laughed at my preposterous degree, a “Master of Divinity.”

I had never been the woman of a man I loved, and not even my Brooklyn mother could inoculate me against shame. I told myself I served the Big Story, but I felt myself to be a lonely comma until I was selected and swallowed.

When you arrived, I curled in the crescent of your certainty. You were the puzzle, I was the piece, flesh of your flesh and bone of your bones.

You brandished such conviction I couldn’t see the cherubs’ flashing swords. Eden was closed for business, but juice dripped from your kisses. You gazed wild in my eyes and whispered, “Who are you?” I was the promise on the far side of your suffering. You had glimpsed me in jail, and none less than Mother Mary had prophesied my coming.

It’s easy to feel like a fool now, the aging child bride who melted into yes two months from first contact. But the bony virgin you chose was a woman in full, and I was ready to garden beside you. You sank your teeth into my trust, taking notes when I spoke of covenant. I was assembled entirely of irrevocables, and you knew I was yours to keep.

But you could not keep your contempt coiled. You swept the wedding cards from the dresser, delighting in how I fell when you dangled your sword. The girl who would not divorce was a pliable bone, and for five years you picked me clean.

You told me daily how filthy you were, taking me on pleasure cruises through your mistakes. I could not blind myself to your light, and I made you look in my mirror even when you gnashed your teeth. My “flowery words” infuriated you, yet I saw you grow green and gigantic against your will. You were industrious and clever, kinetic and quick. When you tried on tenderness, it fit so well I wept. You chose birthday cards and plush sparrows that convinced me I was loved.

I always said too much. If you gave me a dandelion, I exploded into wishes, groveling gratitude. I said you were the truest person I knew, willfully mistranslating your artillery. I thanked you for unmasking me when you cloaked me in your own ghost sheet.

You played too much: “I play too much,” you would apologize by way of condemnation when I tired of being your straight woman. It wasn’t enough that I surrendered twenty years of vegetarianism to your insistence that shrimp would help my diabetes. I had to eat your father’s ribs, punishing gristle that symbolized our tyrant summers. I was too indoorsy and delicate, in need of your education if ever I should grow to maturity.

But you overplayed your hand. All your chiding and guiding, banishing my abnormal velvet dress and embarrassing orange coat, quarantining my mother’s phone calls to weekdays, and excoriating my misuse of paper towels, did not make me your woman. When you told me that my kindness was Saran-wrapped self-interest, you made me feel like a child. When you played harshly with my cats, you made me feel like a mountain lion.

When you played with the cage door too absently, I sprinted down the mountain.

Running through my timeline, every rib rippled. Even after five years of dismantling, I was a woman in full. I had built a community of love, the work of gentle decades. You had taken me in your teeth, but the hour was not too late.

You shrieked at what you had done, invoking saints and angels to save our marriage. You sent me to the priest. You convulsed against me when I took back my meals by force. “She wants to be a skeleton! She wants to be a skeleton!” you howled in my register, my anorexia your eternal checkmate.

But there were new sounds in the valley, bones finding rhythm as flesh and sinew joined together. I wrote my own name over and over. I walked the full length of my seminary campus in conversation with my mentor’s angel. I bought back books you’d deemed unnecessary. I raised more money. I saved more cats.

Strong hands reached across distances you had dug like trenches. I cut my hair. I secured the condo. I blocked your parents’ numbers. I commissioned a red-haired lawyer with canines. I got published repeatedly. The condo smelled of roses and strawberries and the perfume I wore as a little girl. I wore my velvet dress. My boss called me “beautiful,” but I didn’t need him to do so.

I reassembled “irrevocable.” I disorganized my religion. I made promises to the moon. I came back to Eden’s porch with my people and problems and cats.

I pray for you and your parents. You can count on me to do so, even as you count your ribs and wonder what happened. You tell me I blindsided you; tell me I have ruined sunflowers and the moon for you. If you see me in the beautiful things you mocked, I hope you will turn child enough to cherish them again. I want you to know a covenant love that was never yours to give or take away.

I am rocking. I am rippling. I am done running. You can have your rib back.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash