Foreword from 'FUCK YOUR DARLINGS'

“Some mornings I awake with an enormous sensation inside me and cannot identify whether the urge is to cry, to write a poem or fuck someone.” - Heather Christle

I knew I wanted this apartment the moment I saw the bathtub. I knew the top floor would be exhausting, four sets of stairs and no elevator. But the wood floors, the windows overlooking Spokane, and it was a new beginning for my new love in our hometown that we were so desperate to write good into. I would sit for hours in that tub. Reading books, writing in my journal, eating dinner, soaking away sore feet from my serving shifts, hot water coaxing life back into a body wretched by another hangover. 

I wake up and wonder if my thighs are sticky from sweat or cum, and honestly I wish I was hungover. It has been over a year since I have had a drink. I wake up in a Motel 6 in El Paso, Texas, in February 2019. I have a smoking room. I smoke cigarettes with the man from Bumble who came over to my room at 1am. His jawline looks like I can carve an entire turkey. He doesn’t eat the ice cream I asked him to bring. He could not look less like my husband. He is not someone I could or would ever love. He leaves at 4am and I submerge in the bath. Motels with baths are better than nothing. I fuck strangers and I take baths. I am not a complicated person.

The day I nearly died I even brought my body back to that tub. I wanted to go to sleep in the bath and stop waking up in the world where the love of my life was trying to die, every day, a bottle in his hand. I no longer wanted to be in the world where I drank my body into a wanted thing. These photos are from that tub. It’s somewhere in between reclamation and an accident. How you still listen to a favorite album after the break up. How you can’t say no to chicken wings from the first date restaurant. How the road they live on is the fastest way across town. How a bath is a bath is a drowning and a healing and a cleansing. My life has become a wanted thing. My body is wanted and cherished and revered, by me and by those I give it to. 

Now, it has been two years since I was leaving my husband. I am sober again. I have taken a hiatus from motels and from fucking people who, most certainly, have last names. Two years ago I was in love and running away from love. I wanted everything to be different and I wanted everything to be the same. I had this idea for what I wanted and it fell apart every time I tried to fix it. The last time I put out a book of poems I was four months into a marriage. I pulled the plug. Watched my plan go down the drain. The last time I put poems into the world I was sick with love. Today, I am far from being in love and nowhere near a healing. My life is a constant rewriting. A main character has died off. I have changed the setting. It’s possible this isn’t the same plot. Kill your darlings, sure, but fuck them first. I could fuck in every smoking room motel room this world has to offer and still never fall in love again. I could take a bath every day and still have this body to live with. I wake up and I fall in love and I write poems.