Nobody told me I should put down the shard of glass.
The window broke, and I picked up a big piece, and it sliced my palm open.
And I held onto it. Because the window had been broken.
Sure, it got replaced, the glass brand new, but the old one still broke.
Nobody told me I should put that piece down, that I should throw it away.
I just held it and my hands bled and eventually they stained everything.
But the window had been broken. This shard was all that remained of it.
It may be new now, different, sturdier, but it was that old glass once.
The one that broke. That original glass. The one that got replaced.
If I don't hold onto this shard, then who will?
All they see is the new glass, the better glass, the un-broken glass.
They don't remember the glass that rattled in the wind.
Nobody told me I get to stop hurting for that old glass.
Nobody told me I should. They were just annoyed when I left blood on the fridge handle.
When I bled over the kitchen counter, and I tried to tell them of the glass.
I tried to remind them of it, of how it broke, and I showed them the shard stuck in my palm.
And they just wanted the blood gone. The shard ignored.
Other things broke, too. The door, the bed, phones, computers...
All leaving shards stuck in my hands. My arms. My chest.
And they said to let go, to take out the shards, but they refused to recognize them.
They had known these shards. They saw some break, or had broken them themselves.
Yet all they said was to take them out. To get rid of what was hurting me, cutting me, bruising me.
Like they were not all that remained. Of the window. Of the door...
I hugged my mother and I bled on her clothes and all she saw was another thing to get mad about.
I wanted her to see the shards.
If I pick out the shards, one by one, and the scars along my arms heal...
How will anyone know I was hurt at all? Once I heal, it's done. It's gone.
What is all this blood for if it's to be forgotten? The scars to be healed?
Who will believe there was an old window, old glass, if even its reminders are gone?
Who will see it had broken and made me bleed if I don't keep it bleeding?
What am I if not covered on blood?
Like a dragon hoarding its precious jewels, I hoard my hurt. My trauma. My shards.
In my skin, where they belong, where they make me bleed.
My blood, the ultimate jewel upon my body, trickling over everything else.
The shards are all that remain as irrefutable proof of my memories.
If they stop bleeding me out, they are no more relevant evidence.
If I heal, I am not more relevant evidence of everything that's happened to me.
If I pick out the shards without a witness, it is wasted blood.
And if I pick them out with a witness, they have proof it was.
There, wedged between my arteries, is proof, irrefutable, that I have suffered.
That I continue to. That I was impacted. That it mattered.
How could I remove the only things backing up my poor perception?
How could I remove my only evidence when I was raised in courtrooms?
How could I remove what hurts when hurting is all I've got?
All I am?
How am I to leave the pain of that old, crooked window behind?
How am I to put down its shards, after all these years, with all they meant?
How am I to accept, most of all, that they should be picked out of my skin
When for all of my broken, bleeding life I have been the broken, bleeding girl?
Because I WAS the window. I felt it break - how could it not be me that broke with it?
How could it not be me that broke with every window I watched break?
How could it not be my shard to hold onto when I felt the moment it stopped being whole?
The world is glass, and I've picked up every broken piece of it, stuck it into my skin,
Because somebody had to remember what was lost. Forgotten. Replaced. Healed.
There is no easy explanation as to why I need, obsessively, to bleed. To hurt. To prove.
Perhaps it is merely all I've known myself to do. To be.
Hurt. By my family, my peers, the world at large, by whatever put me into this body,
And whoever it is that inhabits it moment to moment -
You'd think with so much glass in your life, you would recognise a reflection -
Perhaps it is who and what I think I am and should be. Hurt. Hurting. Bleeding. Proving.
Proving.
Proving.
Proving.
Written; 2023.dec.29., dec.31., 2024.jan.29., feb.3., may.9.
