I grew up here,
Not just in this city or this state,
But this house,
With my parents’ room down the hall,
The bathroom I used to share with my brother next door.
I grew up on this street,
Right next to the convenience store I used to buy candy from,
Racing to get back before my mom got home from work,
The same yard I’d wait in for my dad every night,
The same neighbors.
So much of this place is as it is in my memory,
How it was when I was just a little girl.
I asked my mother once,
When I was small,
If I could live with her forever,
Scared of strangers,
The idea of not making it home by the time the sun set.
The thought that I wouldn’t just be older,
But actually old,
Was paralyzing.
I’d be responsible for myself,
For my life,
For everything that happened to me.
I wish I had grown up slower.
I wish I still wanted to be here,
Now that I’m stuck here.
Most of all I wish I had become what I used to be so afraid of,
Someone who was responsible,
Someone who could take care of themselves.
I wish my parents hadn’t flown me home,
Fearing for my life and wincing at how skinny I’d gotten while I was away.
I wish they hadn’t realized the damage they taught me when I was young,
I wish they didn’t look at me with that guilt or shame or sadness,
Like they took something from me,
Like they broke me.
I wish they wouldn’t keep reminding me that no matter where I go,
What I do,
Who I meet,
I’ll always be that person I was when I was small,
Fearful and clumsy and irresponsible,
Waiting for someone to come home,
Waiting for someone to take care of me.
I miss when my fears were irrational,
So far into the future they were laughed off.
People used to think it was endearing that I thought about the future,
Now it’s just depressing.
Maybe I was right to be afraid.
Maybe I’ve always known what kind of person I’d turn into.
Maybe this will haunt me for the rest of my life,
Falling asleep in the room I grew up in,
With my parents down the hall,
The ghost of my brother lingering next door.
Is that sad?
Is it sweet?
I guess I’ll never know.

I am wrapped in my memories of you like a safety blanket,
The smoke seeping from your mouth is entangled in my hair,
Lingering in the clothes I stole from you,
Some kind of comfortable asphyxia.
The memories of us sitting on your couch,
Drowning in tears and whiskey,
Sobbing into your chest.
Soft music pours from your phone and your lips,
Old love songs I thought everyone else had forgotten,
The tv is on but I don’t know what’s playing.
The rain hits the grass in your backyard,
The wind rustles the curtain over the backdoor.
There’s a sadness there I can’t quite place.
It sits between us.
I don’t feel the pain I know is there,
Physical or emotional,
Despite the blood or the tears.
All I can focus on is your arms around me,
As we sit on the couch,
As I sob into your chest.
I feel your thumb brush against my arm,
The even rise and fall of your breathing.
It melts the pain while at the same time freeing it.
I like to remember us like that,
So small and so broken,
No hope at all,
But the love is overwhelming.
Through the whiskey and the tears,
Choking on the smoke,
Shivering with the wind.
All there is are your arms,
And your voice,
And your love.
In those memories it's enough,
To keep the sadness at bay,
Keep the pain away,
To fall asleep.

You admire pieces of me
Soft and beautiful
For the pleasure they can give you
You condemn my capability
Practicality and spirituality
You claim I can’t have it both ways
I can’t indulge my senses and hold power the same
Divine femininity has become synonymous with delusion
In a modern world that will never love me
I am aligned with the moon
I am in tune
With the rhythm of the waves
And the passage of days
You don’t know what I feel
How it is to exist in a world not built for you
Every living soul
Assigning your worth for what you can’t control
All of mankind is built on the principle
That my body was built for your enjoyment
That my life belongs to whatever man finds beauty in my eyes
And peace in my silence
Of course I turn to the tides and the trees and the breeze
To find comfort in their embrace
When you can’t hold me
You mock me for connecting to something bigger than my body
Loving Mother Nature more than the woman that brought
Me into this world
Yet you reduce my strength to beauty
Tell me I am too weak and small and simple minded
To understand a world you built
Out of fear of me
My divine femininity

The world around me has become so loud,
Drowning out the sound of my existence,
As if I don’t exist at all.
I’m still there,
Ripples in the puddles I drown in,
Whispers of wind through trees I fall from,
A rotten fruit.
I’m hidden somewhere in the Earth,
Suffocating beneath the weight of the soil and my memories.
I don’t want them to go away,
I don’t want the pain of the past to leave me,
But it’s running down my legs,
A thick red liquid,
It’s infecting my dreams,
Smothering me with smoke.
I need it to be quiet,
Let me breathe.
The dull ache I’ve spent a lifetime keeping at bay,
Chained deep within my brain,
Rising to the surface,
Screeching along its tracks as it careens towards me.
I feel so small,
So fragile,
So weak.
I can’t hear myself think.

One day I will wake up weightless,
With a steady heart,
With rested eyes that will not cry.
One day I will have only good dreams,
Free from fear,
Free from sadness.
One day my mind will be calm,
My thoughts will be good,
My hands will be still.
One day I will live to be alive,
Not just out of spite or guilt,
Not just because I feel I owe it to my mother.
One day I will be here because I choose to be,
I will want to be,
I will hope to be.
One day I will be sorry for who I was in the meantime,
One day.

I wish my existence could be as poetic as my subconscious,
As graceful,
Elegantly dancing through life,
Like metaphors on a page,
Rain filling puddles,
Mud filling cracks,
Swaying arms of willow trees.
I think that I used to be that way,
I appear to be in the hazy happiness of my memories,
But I don’t trust my mind.
I look back on a life lived in pastels,
Baby blue skies,
Blush pink cheeks,
Sage green eyes,
Lilac dreams.
It’s all daisy chains and braids,
A freckled face,
Ferns and worms,
Rolling clouds and running streams.
I wonder now if those memories are just dreams,
Did they ever really happen?
Was I ever really happy?
Or was it all just manufactured to protect me,
A safety blanket,
A quilt handcrafted by my mother?
I wonder now if my life is just an amalgamation of stolen moments,
Memories stitched together by glorified nostalgia,
Fabricated by a veil so thin,
Made entirely of imagination,
A fictitious eulogy written by me as a child to remember the life I wish I had,
A life I’ve never lived,
A tortured poet trapped in a painfully privileged portrait.
Who can I trust if not myself to remember my own life?
I grew up cold,
Stuck in the rain with a broken umbrella,
With stormy eyes and a stormy mind,
Deep greens and blues,
Scarring scrapes from the sharpest scraps of misery.
I was born in the image of hatred,
Generational distaste that I inherited,
The quietest violence,
Gentle wrath buried beneath the softest reflection.
Tell me I’m beautiful,
Oh, how sweet,
Tiny and weak.
Admire all the lies I’ve told myself to stay alive,
Hiding my agony in metaphors,
Tucking it neatly between stanzas,
A great illusion,
Fallacious lines describing a person I'll never be.

It’s raining
In this place that doesn’t rain
This place that’s made of dust
Rocky and bright
It’s raining
And I’m crying
The trees are being watered
As I am withering
Life is being given to death
Barren land
Empty scenes
And I’m dying
In the rain where it shouldn’t be raining
Rain that is not like home
Let me go home
The home that I left
The dungeon I escaped
Let me go back
I want to go back
Where pain made sense
Where rain was supposed to rain
Where tears were supposed to be shed
I want my mother to hug me while she screams
Bruises and bad dreams
I want my father to leave me while I weep
Unwilling to see
I want that pain
Anything over my vacant brain
I want to feel again
Anything
I was invisible
Forgettable
So completely free
My mind was mine
It wandered and it dreamed
Please
Put me out of this empty misery
Take me back home where nowhere feels safe
I want rain where there should be rain
Pain where there should be pain