immersed

in the summer of my fifteenth birthday, i got home one day to find a long white dress hanging in the living room. my siblings were already dressed and my baby sister was going on and on about becoming children of god.

"today you will be baptized.", is all my mother said when she saw me gazing at the dress.

on the drive over to church, my father sped through the roads and speed bumps as he and my mother argued. i imagine this is something joyous and planned, for most families; all i managed to do was cry silently.

4am

i'm falling through this downward spinning hole that's determined to keep me up. thoughts and sounds and colors keep flashing inside of my head. the clock keeps ticking away as i keep tossing. this continues right before sunrise, right before i should be getting up anyway.  there are bags under my eyes, so dark that concealer is useless. the smoke in my head is finally so thick that there's little else i can focus on but the grey mass. it's now become too hard to differentiate between what's outside or what's actually inside of my head.

chancla

She'd tell me this story of how her mother often chased her around their home with a leather sandal. She'd run to the barn and climb to the top, knowing she couldn't go after her herself. She'd wait for hours until her father got home so he could talk her mother down. He'd climb up for her, and help bring her down. She would tell me how furious her mother would get and how she'd still mutter threats under her breath.

Just wait until your father leaves.

I never said it out loud, but I guess you become your parents.

behind the loner

we left during the night.
you told me to grab everything i could carry on my own, because we may not comeback. i couldn't grasp the severity of it, so i left behind all of my favorite books. in the hurriedness and black of the night, i also forgot a jacket; i spent most of that winter cold and shaking behind classroom doors.
the next few months were a whirlwind of going in and out of places. what i remember the most however, was my growing darkness. as we shifted from room to room, i only shifted deeper and deeper.

return

i heard he'd left a feline in the south and started making his way back west. by the end of the summer he arrived at my front door with his fur as radiant as ever. he says he's been roaming past the fields he used to viciously graze, looking for a patch to do his mending. 

but darling, there's no mending to be done. you've migrated thousands of miles and back with intentions to bandage wounds that do not exists outside of your own mind. you've come back expecting healing, and instead we've all lined up to wonder, "why now?"