Raccoons

If you feed a raccoon

it will keep coming back

It will loiter in your backyard if you stop

It will toss your potted plants

to the brick pavement shattering

and tip over your trash cans

You’ll wake to the sound of aluminum hitting the ground

I learned that there is an important distinction between compassion and enabling

I also learned that boys are raccoons

The first got used to my company

We had a lot of fun

One time when I had no phone we fell asleep on the train at 4am and I woke up in Harlem and ran out the train only to realize I’d forgotten him asleep and in my hand his phone

8am He woke up at jfk confused and worried and I said sorry over Facebook messenger 24 hours later

I got to know him quickly and knew to never expect questions because he just wanted to awe from a distance

He wanted entertainment and I filled like water in a plastic bag I had fun until it got cold water froze and the bag broke

entertaining got old

I told him I had to go and sorry and he cried to me in Washington square park for three hours

The kind of tears shed when your favorite rockstar dies of an overdose

Distant monumental

Totally impersonal so I felt nothing but still can’t shake the memory of his quivering paper top lip out of my head

it makes me the kind of nauseous you’d get from seeing a story on the news “girl kidnapped and murdered by her stalker” and the girl looks like you

The next day I was in his neighbors basement at 2am making out

The first day and the first time this guy lied

He never asked me to be his crutch or his cushion

He just squeezed and I felt it as he molded me

too slowly to notice like a frog boiling

“I’ve been through a lot” tell me about

cutting up girls in high school then overdosing and being hospitalized

Now he’s doing better but still can’t let go of his alcoholic abusive dad and that kind of depression

A sadist through and through

He’s always clutching

His hands are always bloody

When he told me I just listened, that’s all he needed

I’d go to his apartment and he’d be half dead on pills half asleep after begging me to come because he’s not well and I felt like I was too deep in the well to see out

I always left before he woke because I had insomnia but instead of asking he always got mad when I wasn’t there in the morning

Especially the day after we did more than make out for the first time and he was so high he fell asleep while I was down on him but before that he kept his laptop on the end of his bed while we were making out and one of us (he said it was me) kicked it off on accident and it cracked but after all that he fell asleep and I left anyways because I felt used and pathetically soft just a cushion

“No ones ever understood me like you do”

One time he left in the middle of the night to his friends left me crying in his bed (he never saw) after lies and withholding and clearly a lack of understanding (if he didn’t ask I didn’t tell so I never felt myself, a crutch and a cushion)

He came back “I love you” he lifted his knees from my stomach for the first time since we had met

Took his weight off my neck

Next time he tried to lay I was hard too

We were both broken but he never asked why just blamed me

We cheated on each other within the first week

Months later and he still calls me from ledges when he needs a crutch or a cushion and I answer and he leans

I was halfway through the year without a guy asking about me

I was over halfway through the year still leaving out food for raccoons

And finally “support me, please I really need it” ok let’s talk about your military father and race issues and the gang you’re in

This time I didn’t have to change shape he just took what needed and ignored what he didn’t

I played his mirror

“Support me”=agree with me

So he could feel right when he fought with his girlfriend, the one he cheated on with me for months

When I found out I cut him out blacked out his reflection so he couldn’t see himself in me

He was never sorry he just kept explaining everything to me as if i would eventually believe whatever he was saying

He never did and still doesn’t see I’m giving and he keeps taking what he needs without replacing

Hes a raccoon I wish I’d never fed

now he won’t go away

Last week my phone rang

my trash cans fell over loudly and woke me

He ate

Cried to me about how his girl friend cheated and I cackled on karma while he lied to himself and me that he wasn’t powerless

he arranged for the situation

as if inaction has ever won someone’s heart he just expected her to do what he wanted just like me and he only told me this after we banged

He cried naked in my bed and I felt pity

I want mercy for the sick raccoon so I’m thinking of knocking it with a shovel

The last day the final straw he said “I didn’t know any of this about you” after overhearing a conversation then he said “you never talk about yourself” you never ask

He just never could stop looking at himself log enough to notice in a two way mirror he could see me too

The hardest part to explain is that after all that taking and how little I spoke about my year of abusive father and rehab teenage brother and cutting ties with my family

I kept giving because I could and I feel sorry for everyone who never got to really know me because if they did understand me they might feel as light as I do at least momentarily

I don’t feel less or lesser at all but I am bored of shining on rocks