Stories for my Daughter

My heart wants you the way a caged bird craves the clear blue sky. Some days I think the collosal ache of all this want may kill me. And yet, here I am living despite what loving you is doing to me. Call me brave. Look at the sheer weight of all I carry. All this love for you I must hold alone.

Nobody warns little girls that girlhood is a war. Even when they teach us to dress in politeness for armour, force us to smile as a shield, yet they give us no weapons, because good girls aren't supposed to have swords at the ready. No one says the words, "The world is a battlefield not the meadows we promised you. When the forest fire comes for you and it will, the best you can do is run."

If one more person tells me to everything is going to be okay, I am going to lie face down in the middle of the grocery aisle and scream, and this is not the best way to start a poem, but neither is the December sky with its neverending promise of hope when the other side of that sky is January with all its bleak cold. All I can say is that there is another side to this side and I can't promise it will be better, but it will be different. And sometimes different is enough to live for. Different is enough to wait for.

The trouble with Decembers is that they remind me of decay instead of renewal, and there is no amount of lights you can put upon a corpse to hide the grief. All I remember about this year is funerals. Of dreams unrealised. Of people I love. Of versions of myself. Allow me my sorrow, it is the sole prize this ache of a year gave me.

If you have known sadness for long enough, a world without sorrow starts to feel like a strange place. No one tells you that sadness can do that. How it can start to feel like comfort. How it can wind itself around you so tight that when it lets you, you feel like you are falling into an abyss of the unknown.

It's December and the world is ending and I have not yet loved or been loved in all the ways I need.

I would rather be loved for this ugly, dark, fang-mouthed thing that I am than be the pretty, docile girl you can understand. Things made of storm and chaos do not need to be understood. We simply need to be known and felt for what we are. A rage trapped inside a ribcage. A heart that is chrysalis to a hurricane.

When I was a little girl, someone I trusted stole my childhood. I am doing the best I can for that little girl. I am trying to give her hope by becoming the kind of adult who would have protected her instead.