thank you
for loving the parts of me
i have not learned to love yet
thank you
for holding my broken pieces together
even as my rough edges scrape against your own
even as the softest parts of you
are rubbed raw by the parts of me i could do without

i am sorry
if sometimes i do not tell you i love you enough
it is only because i love you so much
and so deeply
i forget it needs to be said, because loving you is so much a part of me
i forget to tell you how i love and appreciate you
the way i would forget to tell my lungs or legs

i am trying to be better for you
until i can be better for myself
until the waters of time have worn my rough edges down
to sea glass smooth and shining
until the parts of me i could do without
fit neatly into the mosaic of parts i could never do without
and then all you will feel when you touch me
or hold me
will be the softness of my skin
against yours

1.Remember the past
Remember home
Let memories burn holes in your heart
Scars wander your skin like stars
Veins filled with poetry
Bleed words from your lips
Filling your mouth with broken glass
Spit out your feelings
This is the good kind of loss

2. Soft mouth full of marbles
Shaking hands full of water
Anxious heart full of feeling
Broken fingers full of stories
Everything spills over eventually

Stop treating your poetry like bleeding
It does not empty you
It is your blood trying to be sweet again
It is your heart trying to be bright again

3. Do not stop turning ugly hurt into delicate poems
Do not listen when they tell you your pain is not pretty
Wrap your words in gauze until they are as soft as the flesh of your throat
Tie ribbons around your suffering if it makes it easier for you to look at it

4. This is more than poetry
This is survival

do we ever see the world
in an undiluted state?
i walked through the city streets today
and saw the world double blurred
through the haze of rainwater on my glasses
and the clear bubble of my umbrella

do we ever look at things
and simply see them, without an established frame of reference?
is it even possible to look at something
and see it as it is and not through the telephoto lens of the life you've lived?

does it matter that we look at the world
and can only ever see the things we see?
'is your orange my orange' sounds like a silly absurdity
a quirk of language and the subjectivity of human thought
does it matter there's no way for us to know the answer?

everything we see is filtered through the lens of the lives we've lead
your experiences color your vision like a pair of tinted glasses
my orange will never be your orange
the same way no two things ever truly touch

when you take someone's hand, your skin never really touches on an atomic level
when you look at the city streets blurred with rain you don't see the same thing as the person standing beside you
the important things are not the not-truly-seeing or the not-truly-touching

the important thing is that humans will always try
i will always try to see your orange
i will always try to touch your skin

i have a weird relationship with death
when i was 15 months old i was diagnosed with a rare cancer of the retina
and when i tell people they always say the same thing
oh, i'm so sorry
and i tell them don't feel sorry for me feel sorry for my mother
feel sorry for the woman who watched her infant daughter get cancer
only to get it herself 57 years later
my early life was a blur of hospitals
because the thing they don't tell you about cancer is that unless you die
it's never over
every bump, every mole, every headache, every pain you think
is this it?
is it back? is this going to be the thing that kills me?
but i never really knew death outside of cats and grandparents until college
i never had a friend die in an accident, never had anyone die who wasn't old and expecting it
until my mom's best friend died of internal bleeding of the esophagus in october of 2011
and in the end i think that's what caused my own internal bleeding
not literally but metaphorically
because anxiety and depression and ptsd all feel a lot like slowing bleeding to death from the inside
everything draining away in silence leaving you empty and hollow
until one day you are simply no longer there
on the same day three years later my father died
and when i tell people they always say
oh i'm so sorry
and i tell them don't be
as far as i'm concerned my father died five years ago
the last time we spoke i told him i loved him
and i don't know if i meant it
or if i did it because it was the right thing to do
then two months later my grandmother's friend died
died of cancer to be exact
the thing that could have killed me
the thing that could have killed my mother
i spent four hours in a room with his dead body and i have never felt so much like death was staring me in the face
a tiny specter in the corner whispering
this could have been you
this could have been your mother
i have a weird relationship with death
as a child i refused to go to bed without saying good night
because i was afraid i'd never wake up and would have died forgetting to tell my parents i loved them
i am not afraid of dying
i am afraid of living without people
i am afraid of leaving people behind
because i have been left behind
and it's hard to patch up gaping wounds with butterfly stitches

dear father

when i was six years old i used to play doctor on you
with the medical kit the doctors gave me acclimate me to being in hospitals all the time
now i'm 21 years old and you're laying in a real hospital, dying
leaving me again
you used to be someone i looked up to
but you took that person away from me when you raised that bottle to your lips
when you raised your voice to me and said things a father should never say to a daughter
things no one should ever say to anybody

when i was 16 we kicked you out of the house
and you left us with a pile of rubble to build into a life
and my heart and soul and brain are full of shrapnel
the bits and pieces, sharp and biting are shaped like words
they are are shaped like 'fat' and '****' and 'stupid' and 'never amount to anything' and 'no better than me'

when i was 16 you made a choice
you made a choice that hating yourself and getting drunk was more important then your family
more important than me
i've never heard anything so ******* pathetic in my entire life
than to never have the ***** to get better for the people who love you

when i was 19 my mother got sick
and you dealt with it like you deal with anything
you got drunk and made our lives miserable from hundreds of miles away
even then everything was about you
everything is always about you; your problems your ****** childhood how terrible you think you are how awful this makes you feel

**** your problems
you had 53 years to deal with your problems and you didn't
and now everyone else has to deal with the aftermath
like an island full of land mines so no one knows where to step
you took your problems and used them to abuse everyone else and never took responsibility
and you never will because dead men can't take responsibility for anything

did you really need to take one last thing from me?
you took my childhood and tore it to pieces
you shattered my self esteem, destroyed my sense of worth
you took the person i called my dad away from me
and now before i have a chance to come to terms with all the things you did
you drink yourself to death

i can't confront you about the things you did
it won't mean anything when you don't even know what day it is
do you even remember speaking to me the other day
do you remember i'm still mad
do you even remember all the awful things you did to me

call me spiteful but i'm angry you won't have to live a long life remembering the way you abused me
while i am forced to remember it every day
every time i look in a mirror
every time i cry about something that 'doesn't matter'
every time something is just a little too loud

how come you get to ruin your brain and ruin your body and die and forget everything
and i have to live every day remembering
how is that fair
how come you get to make yourself the victim when i'm the one fighting to survive

how dare you
how ******* dare you
the audacity it took to do all those things to me, and then drink until you forgot them, and then drink until it destroyed you
one more awful thing on a long list of slights you and alcohol have enacted against me
couldn't you have at least not done this now
tracy died three years ago the sixth
how could you ******* do this to us
especially to mom
weren't you supposed to love her?
are you even sorry?

how am i supposed to mourn someone i haven't had the time to forgive
how am i supposed to mourn someone who died a long time ago as far as i'm concerned
how am i supposed to feel when you're dying and taking all my options away from me
one last time

there is no excuse for the things you did to me
there never were and there never will be
and i will probably never forgive you for them
and now i will never forgive you for dying before i had a chance to heal
and for taking any chance i had to tell you how much you hurt me away from me

i will try to mourn the man who drew dots on softballs so i could see them better
and let me draw on his back and put bows in his hair
but it's hard to mourn someone you buried more than five years ago
i had to tell myself the old you was dead to keep myself alive
i don't know what a difference your real death will make in that endeavor

how is that even half dead and hundreds of miles away
you're still ruining my ******* life
and hurting my feelings
i would feel better about your death if i knew it would take away your voice in my head
but i know that it won't

if you ever get better i hope it's with the knowledge of all the pain you made me suffer
i hope you know what you did
at least then both of us our miserable

i told you i loved you when i talked to you on the phone but i can't sign this letter with a lie,
your daughter

when i was a teenager i fancied myself an adult
even when i was younger than a teenager
11, 12, 13 years old, barely not a little girl,
i thought i was a grown up
because functionally i was an adult
i came home to empty house and cooked for myself, cleaned up after myself, did the dishes while i was still afraid of all the knives, did the laundry when i was barely tall enough to reach the bottom of the washer

And at the time, i thought this was a good thing
i talked about how mature i was, how together i was
in high school i was all about how well prepared i was for life because i already knew how to cook and clean for myself
i already knew how to care for myself

and then i went away to college
and at first i was fine, i was right, i could look after myself
i got good grades, i cleaned my dorm room, i cooked myself dinner
i was functionally and legally an adult
and then my mom got cancer
i was 400 miles from home and my mom got cancer and i didn't want to be an adult anymore

suddenly i was nine years old crying alone in my bed
except i couldn't cry alone in my bed because i had roommates
so it was one am and i sobbed on the porch being careful not to cry out too loudly because i was afraid of what the neighbors would think

when i started going to therapy one of the first things she said was that i was a parentalized child
that's someone who, as a child, was forced to act as their own or someone else's parent
a psychiatric diagnosis of 'she just grew up too fast'

i grew up too fast and now i'm twenty one years old and trying to remember how to be a child again
but i can't remember something i never was
i feel like i'm trying to hold onto water

there's a part of me that's young and scared and a part of me that's old and fakes being well adjusted
and for a long time they coexisted
not in harmony, just in separate parts of my brain where they couldn't see or speak to each other
but now someone's gone and introduced them and they won't stop fighting
the screaming in my head is loud and never ceases and i'm never sure which one of them is winning

i have to learn how to be a child and be okay with crying and asking for help with things i should know how to do
and i have to be an adult and be responsible and wake up on time
and i don't know how to do all those things at once
because as much as i like that shel silverstein poem, our ages are not pennies in a bandaid box
i can't be seven or twenty one based on when it suits me
i do not know how to reconcile the warring parts of me

my mother lived through cancer
and i haven't spoken to my father in almost two years
but i am still dealing with the shrapnel that's taken the place of the blood in my veins
and if anyone tells you that growing up quickly is a good thing
that it will make you well prepared for living alone
don't listen to them

i listened to them and now i'm twenty one years old and i can't go to the doctor without bringing a teddy bear
and i can't sleep without a nightlight
and sometimes i even drink from sippy cups because i find the familiarity soothing
because the little girl inside of me never learned to be an adult
and the adult that made itself my skin can't remember how to be a child because they never were one
i am two separate halves that cannot figure out how to be whole together

your life is a building with a hundred stories and no elevator
you have to go to each floor before you can reach the top
if you skip too many stairs you might just fall down to the bottom
and i promise
there is no shortcut worth dying for

There is a cage around my heart
Made of rose thorns
They do not touch the muscle
That thrums fearfully in my chest
But only because the proximity of the thorns
Make it too frightened to swell as large as it could
Or should
I am afraid to breathe
Or feel
Too deeply
For fear the thorns will lodge themselves inside my heart
And never let go.

My daily life is a practice in moderation
And careful measuring
Of how much I can breathe
Feel
Speak
My existence is a study in control
And management
How many breaths of ten does it take
To slow the frantic beating of my anxious heart
How many tapping fingers does it take
To quell the urge to drive my nails into the soft skin of my arms
Like the thorns that threaten the exhausted muscle I call my heart.

I am the product of war
Waged on my home soil
The forest has been burned to the ground
Leaving nothing but stumps
And burnt top soil
And thorns
There might be rosebuds somewhere
Among the thorns
But I am afraid to prune them away
They dig into the bones of my ribs
The top of my lungs
It would hurt if I cut them away.

It is said that burnt soil is the most fertile
But I don’t feel like I’m being re-born
I feel like I am nothing but burnt branches and scarred flesh and thorns
If I clean and trim and prune them away
There will be nothing left of me
Nothing of who I once was
Or who I might have become
Sometimes I cannot feel my heart beat
Beneath the cage of thorns
I am afraid  I might have died
That my heart may have ceased to beat
While I was too busy being afraid.