I am almost twenty-three & her gentle prophecy has yet to come true

My curiosity gets the best of me and I browse through my old musings

I was so...seventeen.

My warped understanding of love with a twenty six year-old man

(predator)

whose sheets I still find myself lost in from time to time.

Fights with my father were mountains

& I was climbing to the apex of his approval,

always just short before backsliding.

Okay, so I guess things haven’t changed that much.

Maybe the five year mark of graduating high school

makes me long to have accomplished something that feels worth this living

I spent so much time hating myself for.

I worry my poems will sound so...22 in five years

marked by smoking too much **** & trying to outdo myself

with tenderness.

Even if I hate my now poems someday,

they serve as prepackaged memories

disguised as metaphors.

As parts of my trying to fall into rain,

unchanged & stop apologizing.

I feel my body’s accomplishments already.

Making it out alive counts.