She exits the door with apprehension
The push of their sorrows, their fears... their lonely hearts
Have become all but unbearable
She can't take the train these days without having a panic attack
Vague reflections dance across the window panes
The light rail careens down the tracks and into the mountainside
While she nervously chews at a hang nail
The precession of half remembered dreams begins
Flashes of color and scent and sound
Her first day of preschool
The Easter basket her mother crushed in a drunken rage
The bruise she was told to lie about
The feel of the cool sand on her feet as she sat by the river
Smiling eyes and lying hands,
Betraying her innocence
Countless nights rendered indecipherable by gin
Calloused thumbs and empty lighters and blackened pipes
Sorrows, rejection, rage, fear... emptiness
The smell of his milk stained onesie, his blanket, his photographs
The tiny, perfectly trimmed nails of his plaster of paris hand
That she keeps in a heart shaped box,
Along with a swatch of hair
The anger in her ex husbands eyes
The loveless torment of her mother's unending hate
Her father's misplaced indifference
The heat of her own silent tears
Become nothing more than the scars and stripes on her back
And the constellations of stars, seemingly etched in her eyes
Yet still,
She Endures.