Dancing before my eyes, is the mirage of perfection.
I reach for it and it slips through my fingers.
My therapist says I am grieving – and how can I stop?
Change tears me from my foundations, again and again.
And each time is like sandpaper on my skin;
new faces mix with old fears in a nauseating pattern.
They say home is not a place, but a feeling of security,
and so, I cannot go home.
Once I had a home in a bitterness of a girl, with eyes like autumn leaves.
That home kept me sharp and angry, as I had always been. But it is not such a torment, when one is not angry alone.
/Here there lies a girl, auburn hair and eyes of molten autumn.
She wanted to burn the world.
Moth to her flame, I followed her to the end of the earth.
And watched as she burnt herself to cinders./
Long after that home deserted me, I found another. This time I fostered myself among a merry band of misfits. At the zenith of this period of home, I found myself entirely humanized, with unfamiliar stirrings of contentment. But, as that home drew to a close – in both place and security, again rose the familiar stirrings of dread.
My trepidation was not misplaced.
Like a reluctant Dorothy, I was plucked from my home by the unforgiving storm of time. My newfangled humanity proved an acute vulnerability. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say. And so, the old bitterness and broken humanity mixed like acid in my blood, leaving a feeble and faithless girl.
It is enough to make one wonder if it’s worth it – to have loved and lost.
I feel as if something has been stolen from me, fate some cruel and callous thief to let me believe in any of it,
to give the pretence of meaning to my meandering life and tear me to pieces with the temptation.
I understand why we become destroyers –
is that a line I too, will cross?
We so wish and dream to be heroes and precious friends, only to be cast out into the wasting and hungry world – full of monsters.
I see, I see how easy it would be, to MAKE it stop.
I swore I would not be a monster – if only so as not to validate the harms monsters have done me.
But if I am to be devoured either way,
have I enough soul left to believe
that
promise
mattered?