I’m five years old,
Sitting alone at my aunt’s kitchen table with a bucket of crayons
Slowly turning an elephant lime green
Because my best friend doesn’t want to play with me.
I don’t know the word rejection,
But now I know the feeling.

Fast forward three years,
It’s my birthday.                                                        ­                                  
I can’t wait to go swimming and eat too many popsicles,
But my mom pulls me aside before the party.
To make sure I know,
That I’m too much person for an eight-year-old body,
To be liked, I need to be less.
And that’s how I found out, a mother’s love can be wrong.

At fourteen,
My sister almost killed herself.
And every day  after that I called her,
As if my voice could uncurl her finger from the trigger of a gun.
Or if I cared enough,
I could put the blood from a hundred cuts back in her veins.
She’s still alive, but my belief that love saves died.

Seventeen-year-old me,
She mistook insecurity for depth.
And thought the smoke from our Black & Mild’s mingling together Was a metaphor for love.

After nineteen years, I talked myself out of love
And into the idea of men who looked at me in pieces.
I still can’t see myself as whole.

At 21,
I learned the difference between wanting someone and wanting Him.
He drew me a blueprint of his flaws,
And I saw a map of how to fix him...

I’m still 21,
And I listen to heartbreak songs.
They don’t sound like I thought they would,
Because I still don’t know how I feel about that one.