1. The route to betterness is bitter. I am so unjust whenever they utter the idea of growth, the idea of it undigging my nails from parts of my core. I ripped into everything I knew, everyone I loved, to unequivocally keep it within reach.
How unjust I become when I recall my strength, a strength that betrays my roots. Every step I took to betterment, the bitterness followed, always ahead. That detachment served perspective with a shadow of opinion, the detachment served ignorance with an even greater shadow of bliss. Staying would have been a betrayal to myself, with the substantial weight of the comfort in being sick, and getting sicker.
Being awake is now a blessing; so is being asleep and so is experiencing sadness without it latching to you forever. When it comes, it is lighter—it visits without making a home of me.
The left behind and the findings of now make me so unjust.
The idea of exhaling it away while my past is suffocating is so unlawful of me. Regaining faith in God and myself made me so unjust. Memories of unanswered prayers and my reflection haunt me. Tears dry but guilt resides.
I'll swallow the bitterness with pride
In hope of rising.
2. Forgiveness,
My soul, my mind, and even my body reject it.
So when I wrote the letter, thanking my father for his apology, it was like I handed him acceptance.
The paper was too thin to carry the weight of how I felt, but I still pierced through it.
The best apology my father gave me was his absence.
I always thought my heart was too stubborn for apologies,
But I stand taller than I ever have
And accept this one with a free mind, as though each moment of distance
Was a step away from resentment.
And now, with a free mind,
I accept this one.
The absence,
The silence,
The apology.
It’s enough.
3. The word ‘certain’ defies association with life.
The facade demands to be longed for:
Certainty.
The antonym keeps the persona alive that I died for.
The breath I lose over the damaging idea that in life there are only two things that are certain, death (inevitable) and life (it cannot wait to get you there).
I refuse to colour the ruins of what I have become.
I refuse to sweeten the bitterness of what made me
A comfort to the perpetrators
Like thorns I shall grow, like words I shall stick, and like certainty I am sure.
4. With love, vulnerability is cursed.
I fear I cannot become all the things I yearn for,
With a hovering man ripping his way into my life and stretching me out to make space,
I'll get full and begin to seep resentment.
How can I achieve fulfillment if love amputates my capacity to be something great?
Something beyond just a woman with goals?
I spent all my years clinging to this religion;
That a man does nothing but poison all.
I felt as though the idea of loving a man meant he will never be satisfied by closeness, but only by possession.
Learning to love again was like learning to pray, to believe,
But I would learn it over and over again if it meant I could experience the cultivation of the right man.
I can and I am allowed to love without it suffocating me, I remind myself of this everyday,
Because there is beauty beyond the man that haunts me.
5. I speak my name
Without apology.
Not softened, not swallowed,
I let it bloom from the root
Of my throat,
Where silence once lived.
I wear my face
Like it belongs to me.
Not to the ones who
Tried to carve themselves into it,
Not to lovers who mistook
My softness for surrender.
I have unlearned shrinking.
There is no need to fold
Myself into the corners
Of someone else's comfort.
No need to wait
For permission to take up air.
I am no longer
The daughter chasing silence,
No longer the body
That flinched at closeness,
No longer the girl
Who mistook being needed
For being loved.
Call me by my name —
The one I gave myself
When I chose to stay,
To rise,
To become
More than their leaving.
I speak it now,
Over and over,
Like a prayer
That never asked for saving.
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