I Adored Living As A Shell Of Myself. I Held Echoes In My Chest Where My Heart Used To Be, And Laughed

That was when I met him. My undoing. He was like a father to me, but I was not like a daughter to him. He knew this. He knew what I saw when I looked into his eyes, and he did not look into mine, drawn into the gaps between my blouse’s buttons like black holes for morality. I was always to blame for his touches. I had always thought of myself as a girl, as a person, but really, I was a place. A place for innocence to die.

I see her far from me. My mother is cool and white and floats like a sun in my mind. But she is a dying star. Her past self pervades my memory but her realness, her fullness in the present is nothing but black space where a blip of sunshine used to be. I cannot reconcile what I reminisce in my mind and what truly exists. I see her far from me. My mother is cool and white and explodes in my mind. The old light she used to shine will keep going long after she stops. And one day, even that false hope will fade. And there will be nothing left for me to peer at from a distance, but a stretch of sky I once called my mother.

There are parts of me, like patches in a quilt, that don’t seem alike at all, that aren’t quite right sitting next to each other at first glance. But I promise they are. I promise my silliness does not contradict my seriousness, I promise that all of me is better together than ripped apart.

I thought the world decayed as I grew old. My weary eyes grazed easily against its pointed cruelties, and I wondered how so much could fall so fast. But it was always that way. I was too young to see it as it was and now I am too old to see it as it can be.

She paws at the gentle glade’s hair, and twirls the green betwixt her fingers. Nothing tastes sweeter than the dew procured there, nothing hurts more than having to leave it.

Something bent so far in me, but never broke. I kept thinking if I went far enough in the wrong direction something would pull me back. That’s what they don’t tell you about abandonment. When you do it to yourself you don’t even feel it. You don’t feel anything anymore.

I will be myself, and if the world rejects that then I will reject the world, and make my own place. I will not be lonely there, because I know there are others just like me, struggling to reconcile the desire to belong and the desire to be.

There is something so shameful in trying. In putting forth the effort out in the open where the onlookers look and dig their forks into my darlings. My creation dies in the end, regardless. Whether they relish every morsel or idly masticate while their eyes are drawn to the street walkers, just like all that came before her, my idea is eaten. And I am left alone to wonder if a piece of my soul had any flavor worth talking about.

There is no wound so healed that the body does not remember its shape.

Why do they call my brother a genius, when he cannot comprehend kindness? When his tongue is tied in any conversation but his own?

Why is the emotional intellect of the women in the room discarded? So often shamed out of me any desire to share myself, my thoughts, upsetting my family feels like embers landing on every inch of skin searing me to silence. The boy gets to be a boy his entire life. The girl has to be a woman the moment he enters the room.