Matthew P. Haubert

Her Name in the Margin

Red hair.
Green eyes.
The shower running at seven
like it always did —
like nothing was wrong,
like nothing was ever wrong.

Sunday mornings we reset.
Didn’t call it lying.
Called it starting over.
Called it love.

I don’t know when I stopped
being able to tell the difference.

She hurt the way I hurt.
I could see it
in the way she went quiet
in rooms full of people.
The way she laughed a second too late.

We were the same wound
pretending to be two people
who had it together.

I never said it.
She never said it.
The shower kept running.
The dogs slept at our feet
like everything was fine.

Maybe it was.
Maybe that’s the worst part

The Hope I would not Wake

I was good at becoming
whoever you needed me to be.

Gave you the mask that made you
stay in the room.
Made you laugh.
Made you feel like you’d found something.

I was very good at this.

The feelings underneath 
the real ones 
I couldn’t face  them directly.
Embarrassed by them.
Embarrassed by me.

So I’d get dressed.
Put on something that cost too much.
Go somewhere loud
full of people I could perform for.

And somewhere around the third drink
or the fourth
I’d think –

tonight.
Maybe tonight I won’t make it home and die.
Maybe that’s fine.
Maybe that solves it.

Every night was that night.
Every night I didn’t care.

And then morning would come
sunlight and stupid
and I’d still be in it.
Still be me.
Still have to fake be someone again.

I don’t know if that was
wanting to die
or just being too tired
to keep inventing myself.

Maybe there’s no difference.

All the Lies at Once

My fantasys had grown so large
I couldn’t remember the ends of it anymore.

Every lie needed three more to hold it up.
Every person needed a different version of me.
I was good at it.
I want to say that clearly 
I was genuinely good at it.

And I miss it.
God help me, I miss it.

The aliveness of it.
Walking into a room and becoming
whoever that room needed.
The way people leaned in.
The way I could feel them
deciding I was something.

I was something.

Just not the something I was pretending to be.

When it crashed
when my room was a cell
and there was nobody left to fake perform for 
the mental insanity I’d been outrunning
walked in and sat down
a ghost waiting to haunt me.

I cried.
Couldn’t let anyone see it.
Had to be tough.
Had to be something
even in there.

One last mask.

The clearest thought I ever had
came through the first nights.
No drink. No audience. No exit.
Just me and the sum of all my lies.

I always go extreme.
I knew that.
I just thought extreme
meant exciting.

Turns out extreme
means you don’t get to
stop halfway.
Means anything you love
comes down all at once.

I was trapped by my own construction of life.
And the only door out
was through two years of stillness and concrete
I hadn’t earned yet.

Patience I never had,

Always 1000 miles per hour, forced to sit perfectly still.

For years, me and my tortured mind