Heavy Hearted

She cut me like a knife. I staggered back and felt the air fill the gash where skin used to be suspended. I slowly clenched a fist against my heart and wished it didn't sting as much as it stung.

I've never been scathed by something she'd said before. I'd been miffed and confused, maybe exceptionally irritated, but never scathed.

It was as if, for the first time in my life, my mother had dumped boiling water on me and then pushed me down a flight stairs to let the blisters bloom. I knew she didn't mean it, with each step I crashed past I knew it was just a mood she was in, but that didn't stop her words from ripping everything I've ever held in consolation from my fingers, every picture of hope off the walls.

He did it well enough, in high school. He showed me that love was a fragment of my own mind, something of my own make that would never be reciprocated and never reciprocated in the way I expected. Love would always fall short, and time and time again experience proved him to be right. He showed me the dark side to men--the dark side of everyone; the side that plays more into our prideful pompous hearts than leans into the thought that perhaps I'm doing wrong by someone else right now. Perhaps I'm crossing a line.

But the Barbie doll house didn't go up in flames until my mother had to tell me I was wrong. And as much as I knew she didn't mean it, as much as I knew it was frustration at a thousand other things and that was the thing she chose to vocalize about, it couldn't help but hurt when Mom said marriage was pointless. It couldn't help but hurt when I was so elated by the idea that someday-someday-I'll have that thing I reached for as a five year old, that thing I acted out with dolls, that thing I idealized with Disney cartoons: that someday I'll have love.

And she spat in my face.

My parents aren't getting divorced, I don't want people to think that my life is crumbling to pieces. It was a bad day on her part. But it's made every day since that much more worse for me, because suddenly I have this nagging fear at the back of my mind that I had quieted. This doubt that keeps rising that it's still just a construct of my mind, it's still just part of my imagination, and that love won't find me and that I won't find it, and that even when I do it doesn't matter.

Because it's pointless.

I wanted to say, If that was true, then why do so many people do it? If that was true then why has unity between man and wife withstood the test of time, why has that lasted? Why am I here if a procreation of love was pointless? Why would God let something so beautiful be pointless?

I know He wouldn't. He couldn't. But this dense tar of doubt clings to each glorified expression, growing stringier and needier with each desperate yank I make to rid myself of it.

I have optimism. I'm not saying I don't think anyone will ever find me attractive, or that anyone will ever be a kindred heart to mine, I'm just...

When you wake up as a teenager and you're awkward and your hair is greasy and you're chubby. And you have braces. And clothes make you look like a bloated box and you sound like a man and the only thing pretty about you is your eyelashes, but you fiddle with your eyelashes and pull at them because you've been doing it since you were a child and they're getting thinner and thinner... you start to doubt that any of those really cute boys that you keep talking about with your friends will ever actually look at you and remember who you are. And when that part of you dies, when that awkward phase ends and that part of you dies and you start to look the way you'd always hoped you did but acknowledged deep down you were terribly far from, you have to rebuild yourself and say that you weren't making things up when you were a kid and everyone was equally as ugly. That you just took a minute longer than everyone else to stop being hideous.

And you build yourself again.

And the last thing when you want when you're constructing yourself anew and establishing footing in a skin you didn't think you'd ever appreciate, is to hear that the thing you've been rooting for your entire life, that all encompassing goal, the end all of end all of everything, isn't as great as it's cracked up to be.

After The Storm

My mind is a tempest today.
A whirlwind of confusion forces fog
Against the rigging of my boat,
And in the clouded stupor
I am left with the constructs of my mind;
All the meager things I never dwell on in life
That climb out of darkness to twist the imagination
And insist I see them for what they are.
Shrouded in grey-scale I'm left to acknowledge
My horrors and concerns,
My nauseousness and grief,
And the possibility that I am wrong.

I am rocked across the sea,
Salt pricking my skin
As water lashes across my face.
I am trapped with my thoughts,
The jagged rhythm of the ship
And the clanging of pulleys
Prevent my eyes from focusing on the abstract idea
Of you.

From this angle you look like you prefer her,
And I am reverted to a sub-par state of being
I occupied most excusably in high school.
As the waves crash I see you
Ringleader of this game
You created against my heart
To tear down the fallen until they rise no more.
With my hair tangled about my face
From the roaring winds of angst
You become synonymous with him,
Him, him, and him.
You don the hat they all exchanged,
In possession of the knowledge which
Will tear me down
And break my bones.
I am pathetic and lowly
And none,
Above all you,
Would ever choose my hand.

The current drops and I am thrown
To the deck,
My knee bent near my chest,
Sprawled in a chalk outline-
A murder you committed.
Face-down I remember all you've been;
How ignorant and childish I am
To assume malicious action on your part.
You know as much as I do,
You're unsure as much as I am,
But comfort will not hold as the ship
Is rocked again, the fog clenching
Tighter, a reminder of my imagination
And subconscious tendency to pen outcomes
Before beginnings arise.
I've labeled you important,
I've crafted you as special;
The tempest and fog refuse to shed light
On which end of my mind
Is right.

As the tempest swells
I run and wake the master,
For in days past he
Rebuked such wind and
Calmed such seas and
Cast a humble eye on the weak.
I can no longer weather alone
This torrential torment of the mind,
The way my heart is failing
And falling to a
Despair-ridden deck.
I focus beyond the deluge
Of my mind, farther into
Perfection than my fears of drowning
Death,
And await his calming steady hand.

And as he aids me yet again,
He asks
Why are ye so fearful?
How is it that ye have no faith?
Have patience that the storm will pass.
I know thine pain,
But more so
Thine path.
Believe ye not this storm will last.