(crack in the tourniquet)

My brain is a map of my father's right hand. a cracked line along gray skin, stained from the soot of toiling under another man's success while family faded and the future slimmed into a glimpse of what could have been had there only been a moment before it all disappeared when he knew what it took to make him the fire igniting his blood to this day.

I understand more now than i ever have about where i come from and just how that makes me who i am.

For years i had admonished a certain element of my past (if not the whole fucking thing, which i do believe is still subject to debate depending on just where in my bloodline you start up your queries). i hated my father. i admonished his kin. i wrote them off like i did the place i'd spent growing up and learning what it meant to be afraid.

Fucking los angeles.

And though i still loathe the place (for stunted reasons, i admit) there's a growing part of me that wants to go back.

Hell, that's where i'm from and that fact sticks to my bones no matter how much of this concrete i try and dye into my skin. it's where he was from too. it's where they fell in love. married. and did their goddamn best to raise me.

Fucking los angeles.

The first time i was drunk was on it's streets. the first time i found a gun pressed cold in my face. my first innocent kiss. my butterflies. the obtuse life that's made me who i am in spite of years in the cold.

I am the incessant sunlight. i am the filthy shores. i am the vacuous nature of a love in the hills. i am a frantic miscreant.

But i'm here now and i doubt i'll ever return. that cultures lost, for the most part, in me but the lunacy still burns. the metaphysics. the manic depression. the loose commitment to the passage of time when there's so much more to be considering.

Like love.

It always comes back to that, doesn't it? the nature of love in the rote tumult of my life.

I am in love now. i have been as long as i can remember. it's embedded in my person. and though the derivations from person to person vary wildly the earnestness is there. the whimsy. the passion. the yearning.

And i love her perfectly.

Just like he did her.

But unlike his folly (for which i have forgiven him in ways i doubt i'll ever echo clearly) i will never let my love slip away. i'll keep it with me, so deep sometimes i forget how it inspires me until days and hours later when i'm lonely and the cigarette burns too close to my fingers. when the wines all done and the songs gone on too fucking long.

I will remember.

Because my love defines me.

It's the one glory i can be.