Hi,
Thank you for being here.
Continuing on...
Was that my first burden?
My first scar?
My first lesson
that my life was always going to cost someone something?
Did we grow up the same way?
Because I don’t think so.
I’d take your parents over mine
—except they were somehow the same people.
Same faces,
same walls,
same roof.
Different childhood.
Then there was you,
You were the angel boy,
the golden son,
the one who did no wrong
even when the wrong was right there
in your hands,
in your silence,
in the way you pushed us away
and then blamed us for feeling the distance.
Family doesn’t take breaks, they said.
Family doesn’t need space.
Family doesn’t breathe.
Family is forever.
—except forever felt like a fucking sentence.
Did we grow up the same way?
Because I remember carrying
everybody’s everything:
my mother’s sadness,
my father’s rage,
my brother’s storms,
my sisters’ shadows.
My own?
No room for that.
I was the “happy little girl,”
over and over,
chanted like a spell.
Say it again.
Say it enough times.
Maybe it’ll be true.
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