Today we can cry the tears we held down while hitting streets and making voices heard for what was being taken.

Tomorrow we will tighten our laces and push forward for everyone’s right to exist and thrive.

Let healing and forgiveness be in our hands to give to those who wake up in this.

Let the burden be on the guilty, so the tired may rest.

I never meant to start this but I’m not sorry I’m here.

It’s like a time line into my own lucidity and lunacy.

Things I very much keep a tight lip on.

Feeling mental.

Feeling cold.

Feeling oddly… motivated.

Upheaval to evolution and poof… back to feeling like I can barely contain a grasp on reality.

Logically, it’s the cycle of healing from things I could not control as a child.

Logically.

I know that, but it doesn’t make me feel any more normal.

There’s this part of me that knows no matter how much I like people, I will never really be known by them.

Not truly.

And it causes an ache in my chest that nothing seems to ease.

Because I am deeply ashamed of the things that have happened to me.

Because I still can’t talk about them without wild fury and tears.

So I listen and nod, too frozen to talk about my experiences in too much detail.

And so this deeply wounded part of me will only linger like a phantom between me and the people I try to hold close.

Creating a gap I am unable to cross.

I think it’s what makes people afraid of me or think I’m cold.

Make no mistake… there’s a great compacity in me for violence, malice, and apathy.

A part that enjoys pain and causing it in others, one that I will always battle with.

what I learned to be… but wish to deny.

I envy gentle women.

Soft women.

Those full of grace.

Those that walk only touched by light.

Those unmarked by the wreak of death.

But…

If I really think about it, I would not trade with them.

As much as I would like to be more like them.

I have walked the poison path for a purpose and I cannot change where I have been.

However…

I can learn from them, of the places I’d like to go.

And I am kind of okay with that compromise in the end.

I wish I could peel off what it is I see and hold it out for you too view, so you can behold the light that beams from inside you.

Your kindness, your self assured energy, your sly smiles, and wit.

I wish I could help you be less afraid, that I could love into you the things you need so much.

I wish you all the things that you so desperately seek, the things yet to come, and peace to the things that never are meant to be.

I know I am but a bird in a glided cage.

Surrounded by bobbles and shiny distraction to make me forget this is not my home.

Wings clipped, i can no longer fly on the wind that once took me to each new adventure.

My view, through bars, but if I get close enough I can pretend I am out in the open wild and warmed by the sun.

I am trapped in a space bought just to keep me shut off from prying eyes… when I am lucid it all comes crashing in.

In quiet moments when left to my own thoughts… I am reminded, I am still a prisoner.

You take me out of this cage only to show off you pretty bird and quickly, like a selfish child, become angry if that bird gets too much attention from others.

If only I could always remember…

I’m a prisoner.

One you would euthanize long before letting another look after me.

Not that I have ever needed looking after…

When I was young, I would have thought this to be beyond luck:

to be the bird in a glided cage.

No more bruises, no more aged hands that clawed at youthful skin.

So I resign myself most days to being grateful, to remind myself of where I came from.

I suppose it’s not so bad, considering…

The world has been collapsing into chaos for months…

But all I can think about is the sound of your laugh, the way smiles reach your eyes, the smell of your cologne, how your finger tips on my skin felt.

But none of it’s real…

I am painfully aware none of it is real.

I made it all up from peices of memories and dreaming of you.

I got you out of my head and then I let you slip in again to be my mental security blanket.

So I could put on a brave faces.

So I could convince myself that “someday might come”

Knowing damned well…

It will not.

I must not be well, if I logically know how crazy this is and yet I still allow it to comfort me.

But who am I but another faceless cutout girl with mix and match attributes… most of which, I am aware of your distaste in.

But here i sit, still wondering…

What makes you give a real belly laugh?

What makes your heart skip beats?

What makes you mad with passion? Rage?

How do you handle under pressure..?

I suspect it’s to avoid the inevitable.

The world is not well.

I am not well.

We are struggling to pull air in lungs that bubble with the apathy grown in our hearts while drowning out each others sound with bickering.

And I think I am resigning to madness so that I do not have to feel it for myself.

I know I can’t hold this image forever, because I know it’s not meant to be.

For today I’d rather shut away from the world with the idea of you, then shove you away and pretend to be any other version of myself…

The boys I liked never liked me.

They didn’t walk me home, or sit outside my house throwing rocks, or tell the other boy to ‘fuck off’

They never wrote poems about my smile, or complimented my shampoo, they didn’t stand on cafeteria table and sing songs from the 80s.

They walked right past me in halls, and stores, and city streets.

Their blank stares like rushes of ice cold air waking a hatred for myself.

It wasn’t like the movies, my invisibility didn’t wash off, and no amount of makeovers would change the fact that they never saw me, as a whole person.

I wasn’t easy, but somehow I was a slut.

I wasn’t pretty, but somehow I was vain.

They didn’t notice they called me the wrong name.

Repeatedly.

They didn’t notice we did, in fact, have math together

They didn’t notice that I was anything but a stick figure passing through their colorful life.

The boys I liked never liked me and I wonder so many days…

IF they had would I be as strong today?

No.

I think I would be someone else.

It may still sting my inner child’s pride, but I never have to think about turning back.

I never have to regret these 2493 miles.

I never have to tow anyone’s line because I was made strong on my own two feet.

I am a talker but only to drowned out my thoughts… because when it is quiet, there is nothing but constant chatter in my head.

I’m taking note of everything, looking for patterns, threats, admiring how the light today reminds me of a poem I read…

Constant. Noise.

It’s exhausting.

The older I get the more it wears me down.

And if I’ve learned anything it is the need for stillness, and to really listen to myself.

Beyond all the trauma and tittering was the dreams I once clinged to.

A silent list of desires I wanted that I am unsure of their ability to be manifested.

Listening to the items one by one made me sad.

No… not sad, I felt heartbroken.

I still feel it like cold knots in my chest pulling tighter everytime I think of the list that sat alone and whispering for who knows how long…

Nani became silent too…

And that felt like the worst part.

I was always teetering on whether I had lost what once made me feel special, had my stability disable my gifts?

And some days when there are no people here I felt alone in the world. And to some that may sound normal, but for me I never FEEL alone, there was alway something or someone hanging about.

Some days it feels like my guides all drop in at once, only to be swept into silent emptiness the next.

I’ve been having more and more silent days…

So I know I need to go inward again.

To sit in the stillness.

Where the memories and the pain and the shame and the guilt and that very broken little girl resides throwing her constant trantrums.

I know I need to listen to that wounded girl… to hold her, console her, to accept her and love her the same way I would if my own child were to act out…

And there goes that list again.

Just a constant whisper of my former dreams only now, at 34, the vioce sounds as if giving it’s last death rattles.

I felt the moment my maidenhood was over.

The moment I joined so many others in the “wise crone” era of my life.

That’s what this year had been about.

Tuning the wrathful broken girl into a wise women, full of love for things that many have yet to appreciate.

I am enough.
And I am not sorry you never saw that.

Because if you had I would have settled for “it’s not so bad” forever.

I would never have pushed my boundaries to grow, expect better, to want more from others. I would have been oh-too-small for all the big things I really want.
So thank you, for me never being enough for you.

Because it allowed me to become everything for me…

I’ve been angry at you for so long, I’m not sure I could ever find enough words to describe why.

You left cold aches in places of my heart that were once filled with afternoon laughter and secrets.

My first best friends, familia.

And we may have drifted as I got busier and you got, sick…

I’d dreamed of the day we would hug and cry and celebrate surviving our youth.

But you didn’t.

And I’ll never hear your laughter again.

And I’ll never see you admiring the beauty in other people with those most genuine hearts.

Deep feelers.

They are abused by the nature of humanity…

And you were but another casualty.

I will never forget the things you taught me to see….

I miss you today.

I miss you everyday.

My first best friends, familia.

I dont talk about this often.

And sure there’s a difference between slapping a hand and what a lot of us went through as kids.

I remember not understanding why my sister wouldn’t spank my nephew is was… 11 when he was born, I really thought that’s how your parented a child, with violence and anger.

I was a power keg of repressed anger, distrust in authority figures, skewed perspectives of affectionate behavior and boundaries, and maladaptive people pleasing.

Until, I was about 14 and the very tight laces of my understanding of what was happening were ripped open.

I was extremely not okay and yet wearing a mask so no one knew.

When things adults had done were somehow now unacceptable if others did them.

I’m not broken because I was born inept, or with some predilection to “mental illness”.

I have a trauma disorder.

I was raised to be somebodies victim and I said “fuck that” but that was a lot of push back when I did.

But I am a much stronger person then I have ever been credited with.

If you don’t understand if something is abusive, all you have to do is ask yourself:

1) Am I breaking the law?

2) If someone else were doing this would I be okay with it?

That second one, is what made me realise the bad people in my life were well aware that what they were doing was wrong.

That, broke me up inside for a long long time.

Was i not loveable enough to keep safe?

To protect?

What about me was so bad that noone walked into my life without leaving bruises?

After a decade of no answer I took it into my own hands, finally saying the words that plagued my nightmares?

Why am I bad?

I’VE repaired me,

not you,

not your Shit skewed woman hating God,

not your “thots and prey”

I.

Me.

And a hell of a lot of work went into it.

No thanks to you…