BOOMERANG VALENTINE By ANDREA GIBSON

I’m sitting on my friend’s couch several months

into being intentionally single and celibate

for the first time since I was twenty years old,

twenty years old, when I believed sex

had to involve a dude and the word screw.

I’m telling my friend about the psychic

who said I’m gonna meet the love of my life

by the end of January. It’s January 10th

and I am so far from ready

for Cupid, that naked little shit,

to fire anything sharp my way,

so far from ready to be the kind of unhinged

only love makes me. My friend musters every bit

of New Age jargon she can fit onto her tongue and says, What if

you are the love of your life? I think, Oh my god, I hope

that’s not true,

because I am absolutely

not my type.

But let’s say for a moment I am.

Let’s say I am my dream girlish

boy, and I’m standing on my front porch

ringing my own doorbell waiting for me to answer

so I can hand myself a mason jar full of water lilies

I have rescued from a millionaire’s Monet.

Let’s say I am so charmed by the radiance

of my own anarchy, I invite myself in

for tea, and when I’m not looking, I sneak

the steam from the kettle into my pocket

so the next time I’m missing the coast of Maine

I can gift myself the fog.

Let’s say I’m not just running my mouth

around an old cliché that says we gotta love ourselves.

We don’t. I know I could

keep getting down on myself

until I’m tucked in my grave, looking up at my name

carved in stone, wondering why I never knew

I’d been cast for the lead in my own life.

When it comes to love the only thing I’m certain of is:

you are the best thing

that has ever happened to you.

Whoever you are. You’re a quitter? Great.

There’s plenty worth quitting.

A sore loser? Who isn’t?

Got no discipline? Maybe discipline is for bodybuilders

and closeted gay monks.

Picture a magician

so attached to being perfect

he cuts off his own legs to pull off the trick.

Picture the 738 selfies I deleted

before I took one I was willing to show to the world.

Picture me wishing I could get all of them back—

my so-called flaws stacked like baseball cards

I know will be worth something someday,

like compassion, like tenderness,

like my capacity to think myself a catch just because

I have never seen a chandelier I didn’t want to swing from.

On days I have a hard time keeping warm

in my own weather, I imagine what the flower wanted to say

to the first human trying to name half its petals love-me-nots:

No, that is not how anything grows.

Of all the violence I have known in my life

I have never known violence

like the violence I have spoken to myself,

and I have seen almost everyone around me

hold that same belt to their own back,

an ambush of every way we’ve decided we’re not enough,

then looking for someone outside of ourselves

to clean that treason up.

If I were to ask myself out

of that cycle, I might say, Listen,

I am still going through a growth spurt.

I am still yet to get my worst tattoo. I am still trying

to get rid of my mirror face. I am still learning

to look myself dead in the eye.

I know Facebook is a lousy mortician

desperately trying to make us all look more alive.

I know there are things I haven’t survived.

I know there are people in this world

who have been through hell with me.

I don’t ever want to take that lightly,

but I want the heavy to anchor me brave, anchor me

loving, anchor me in something that will hold me

to my word when I tell Cupid I intend to keep walking out

to the tip of his arrow, to bend it back toward myself,

to aim for my goodness until the muscle in my chest tears

from the stretch of becoming what I came here to be: a lover

of whatever got covered up by the airbrush,

the truth of me, that beauty of a beast

chewing through the leash

until I got a mason jar full of water lilies

and a kettle full of sea, and my whole life

is a boomerang valentine

coming right back at me.

- andrea gibson