Do I need a better flashlight?
a braver mouth?
a new dictionary
to find fresh words
to form familiar sounds in new ways?
I need brave spaces to fall apart
without anyone reaching for the thread
to stitch me back together.
I need people who don’t expect me to always be so strong
who know strength to be expansive and multifaceted
that my today strong might be a different shade or color entirely than yesterdays’
I need love woven into safety.
When I do not feel safe enough to name
my trauma
it calls me out of mine
feeds on my everywhere silence
bends me to its always will,
leaves me pretending I am healing
smiling
shrugging in the key of,
‘I don’t care… or
that was so long ago…”
leaves me
crying
like the city water fountain
like everyone wishes in me and I’m not sure
I’ve made any of them come true.
I need to be in community perpetually
with people who remind me
that I am making them come true}
even on the days where I feel impossibly inessential.
I have a voice even when I feel it is in vain.
What I do not make room to speak about
speaks for me.
What I do not share
shrinks me
in solitude
pushes me to be silent
no
to become silence
But the things I have done,
what I’ve lived through,
what I’ve said and what’s been said to me
what I stay up at night lamenting about
does not care about me
is not actually able to care.
(and if it were it would only care about itself, not where I am going)
My past thinks itself funny, thinks itself lesson,
thinks itself the kind of story I should tell
and tell until I do so laughing.
My past knows it is over.
My past sweet-talks my shame
down from the ledge.
It finds my grief up there too writing its’ own poem
My shame will not read their poem
will not write at all
so it grows bigger and bitter.
and my grief keeps telling a story
no one is reading
writes a story
long and knowing (and probably better
than this one)
but I wouldn’t know that-
I never read it either
(not because it doesn’t speak my language
but because it speaks at all
and that confuses me).
How can it know so much about itself and expect me to do the work to understand it?
Then again, how can we do that to each other?
I think the things we carry the longest
and the heaviest are the moments
we were misunderstood.
Sometimes I want to introduce myself
but my arms are heavy with all this carry.
When someone is willing to walk alongside me
it doesn’t change where I am but it does make the path seem possible.
I am still on the roof
I am with the shame
I am at the ledge
but I know I cannot jump
I cannot let my past put me in its’ place
I cannot let my shame shape my speech
let my trauma twist me tortured
marionette me through this life.
I have to tell my story
I have to make spaces for other people to tell their story
even when the trauma says
My story isn’t really worth much.
I say my story is worth exactly as much as it keeps me here telling it.
It got me here
(right here)
and on some days
I know that by the sound of my laughter
a friend’s voice
or even just our breath-
all such holy sounds.
When I feel held, seen, understood
I am reclamation
I can say, ‘this is mine now,
even if sometimes I don’t know how to talk about it
even if sometimes I fake it until I feel it
even if sometimes I barely feel it at all.
I don’t have every word for everything that has happened to me
but what I have is here
but what I have is mine
but what I have is enough for now’
until more words
until more joy
until
& 