andrea

But I can only hope. I can only dream. I can only wish. I can only get down on my knees and pray. Pray it all meant something. Pray this merciful, all-powerful, all-knowing God they speak of knows what he’s doing. Pray this suffering comes with an expiration date. Pray there is a prize to be won for having endured all of this torment despite having lost the race.

For I fear a million days will have passed and I will have crawled to the end of the world by then, and in my dying breath my heart will rejoice, thinking perhaps this will be a good excuse to invite you back into my life.

I fear I will never stop being on my knees, unsure of whether I’m begging to be released to you or from you.

i thought my kindness was generous and not a fear of confict. a fear of flushed faces and balled fists. i held back from judgment to follow a moral compass that was faulty at best. but no one has hesitated to be judge, jury, and executioner to me. and is it not a crime to not attend court when summoned?

will my father shame me for my vices? will he be repulsed by my drug of choice? will he find in me the thing he fears most? a mirror. his blood and flesh contaminated. the soil contaminated. you can't build a home on top of hidden bodies. the rot spreads.

i have not found love because i have not looked for it. i have looked for something that looks like love from the outside looking in. for something that will feel redeeming. something that will give me dignity and safety in places where i was stripped of both. something that will exist as a statement— you were all wrong. but everything i do is from the outside looking in. and i think love requires presence, it requires groundedness so i can listen to the voices that come from deep within. voices that can recognize their way home. i think to find love i must come back into this body, ask it what it likes, so my dreams can come from happiness and not insecurity.

Life hardened me without having me sign any papers. I was evacuated from my own story without consent, without notice. I would’ve never traded my innocence for wisdom had I known it would drain me of my spirit. Had I known that innocence alone is capable of summoning joy. This sensibility I have been carrying with shame is but an echo. I was something louder. I was something deafening. All this time, I thought myself fragile and scorned myself for it. Little did I know, I was protecting the last of my softness.

I do not know what to make of love. My pride thinks it weakness but has been continuously wounded by it. My spirit greets it like an old friend, like a way of being. I am terrified of it. I am learning to approach it with humility before it makes another example out of me. No matter how many storms I survived, I still keep my windows locked. I still keep my eyes closed. Even beauty can blind.

I know it’s silly to think of you as an addiction.

But what is heartache

if not withdrawal?

I think I am the space between mind and body. They don’t communicate much. I am mostly silence. They argued once over who held the most wisdom, but have rarely spoken since.