I will not be eaten up by anger.
I refuse to store anger in my body. Unused.
And you. I will write you out of my system
And that is the most pacifist thing I could possibly do.
Instead of hating myself for making the wrong joke
Or scratching, tearing my own skin
Or cursing you with my mouth closed
Or yell at red lights not turning green.
I look at all the faces that I wore,
The ones I don’t even recognise
The ones that alienate me to the very core
And then I stop and see how they represented
Everything that was broken and needed healing.
I thought I looked the most beautiful
When I embodied the greatest disaster.
In retrospect I can detect and say that.
I couldn’t leave the house without make-up.
I’d waste hours and hours putting on layers
Of self-erasure, locking myself away, hiding
My father’s face, my crying mechanisms, powder-dry.
I looked so strong and invincible, but if you pushed
My buttons I’d be so fragile that I’d break, then and there.
And still you wouldn’t see it. I wouldn’t let you.
I nurtured the falsities that others thought of me
And now that they disgust me I wonder what was I thinking?
-I made myself dumber for silly loud boys
-I made myself small to please the bad boys
-I pretended to be sexually mature when I was anything but
-I pretended to love risk and danger for the cool girls
-I lied and I lied and I performed and I experimented and I failed
And succeeded.
When I played these roles and tried them on
I could observe the reactions of others
Would they drag me along? Put me down? Help me up?
Would they trust and believe the facades?
Would they see through all of the bullshit or would
They take advantage of my rootlessness, my weakness,
My vulnerability? Would they just not give a shit?
And play along? Pretend that nothing wrong is happening?
If the premise is a lie, then everything that follows is too, right?
And I collected my inner scars, one after the other.
Giving myself away, under my worth, under my fucking worth.
All the fucking time. Until what I truly was started to burn inside.
And every single make-up brush or lingerie or male hands and female words
And teachers’ punishments pecked at what had always been substantial but suppressed
In my stomach, my body, my mind, my appearance.
I felt attracted to people that did nothing but insult and devastate me.
I never understood why. I thought, this is it. That is all I will ever get.
I will fall into my grave unloved and unseen.
And I withdrew, I always did, and I realised what I had been used and
Subjected to since the moment I was born and I said to myself
That I will get the hell away from this and shed every single little thing
That is not me.
These clothes, these so-called friends, these lovers undeserving
Of that word, these bullies and narcissists, these desires that had been tampered with,
This language, this victimised posture, the unusual silence, the not speaking up,
The repression of genuine laughter, the endless capacity for bullshit and abuse.
Croque-Melpomene 