Incorrigible

and the sunshine girls? the ones who know themselves inside and out and are just comfortable in their own skin and make you feel wanted and beautiful because them even looking at you makes you feel special because they’re so amazing and how could someone that radiant even exist

and then the stardust girls? they’re just so ethereal and every way they move makes the world a little more brilliant and everything they do is perfect and makes you gasp because they’re too good for this world and they can’t possibly be human and there’s just so much in their mind and all you want is to climb inside and revel at their brilliance

and the galaxy girls? their laughter is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen and when you make eye contact and they start to come towards you it’s like you finally know where you belong and they’re colorful and amazing and god how are they even here

and the sunset girls? all you really want is for them to hold you and sing to you and tell you stories because they have so much art in their souls aching to come out and all you want is to see them shine like you know they can because the world doesn’t deserve to see their creativity but god does it need to

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.

Because our mother does,

Because her mother did,

Because her mother lived through the Dust Bowl.

One day my father sat me down and told me about epigenetics.

How the trauma he went through

As a child in an abusive home

Wrote itself into his DNA

And, in turn, into mine.

How he and his brothers,

In various ways,

Are all sick from it.

How I might be too, someday,

And I’m not sure I’m not.

I hear people say,

When will we get back to normal?

And I think of a woman born in the twenty-first century

Who puts her glasses away differently

Because of what her great-grandmother endured