Happy Mother's Day

As I stood there alone in the quiet water dripping down on me

It all led me to stop my left foot down in anger, and scream so loudly inside my head

mother it hurts me so much that you hate yourself

Why was that the thing. . . wanting to come out of my mouth?
When just last night

I told myself 

I hated you

Mother, I didn't understand why two nights ago I tried telling you all my worries and my plans, trusting you for the first time in so long.

It was two hours that I spoke - and you conversed.

Yet last night you dared to insinuate
that everything I told you that night was crap, and the only thing you cared to remember was that I was sick with a fever.

I, I just don't understand, how you can be so cold when I need you yet you want me to believe you love me.  I don't understand why you try to make me cry when I've done nothing wrong.

But here in this moment I understand.

And I try not to feel sad as I know that the reason for my enlightenment now is a friend who betrayed me in the same.

Mother, you are everyone who's ever disrespected me.

and I no longer feel sorry for myself for being the one to have a mother like you.

Mother, I'm sorry you're so insecure in yourself. Mother, I'm sorry you've lived your life blaming yourself over being imperfect

It all started that day you decided to get knocked up by your deadbeat cousin, because his inability to provide for himself guaranteed you a lifelong marriage.

That was the day when your true colors showed.

And now I know, through all those years of trying to forget the bruises and the pain,
 it's still all the same. 
As long as I live here with you I see every way in which it is the same. 
In these few hours of God-given clarity, I want to see as much as I can so that I do not forget.
Just like that morning I was thirteen, you first offered me to wear concealer and foundation.

I walked proudly into school with the purple circle the size of a fist on my left eye. From him.

I walk proudly today knowing colors fade, but truth prevails.

And as I stand here with my head to the floor, weeping and screaming. I promise that this time I'm strong enough and I'm finally old enough that I won't look away.  I won't try to forget for the possibility of reconciliation and an easier future.  I always angered my self every time I saw through the deception I placed trying to fool myself into happiness.

You masking this hatred of men, and your lifelong struggle of turning it into hate for yourself.
I will never forget, I am finally strong enough to live with this reality without letting it torture me.  Nothing can touch me right now, nothing within me is against me right now.

In this moment I fear nothing.  

                Listening to the sadness of a song of heartbreak as a child.  The vastness of an ocean on a caribbean sunset. Death. The cold in a lone night.

I remember these so well. Yet they seem so distant from me.

In this moment I hate nothing. Not my long labia, nor the small gap between my two front teeth, nor the traces of purple always under my eyes. All these things I wanted to change, I longer see the need. . . Nor the curl of my natural hair, nor the sound of my voice, nor the under-pronation in my feet. Not my past. And in this moment, I hate Nothing outside myself.

My chest feels smooth like a wall of white marble, much like the wall right in front of me.  Yet I see nothing physically in front of me.

I feel perfect, I feel whole.  and I feel nothing but this .  Despite the wet hair on my unclothed back, the pale seeping onto my face I do not recognize.

I could stay in this recording of Chet Baker almost blue, just smiling at myself in the mirror, all night.
But this is a new soundness to my existence.
For I, refuse to forget in comfort. I, refuse to soothe the tears on my heart to a slumber.  I refuse to hide my chest from the cold of the night sky piercing through me.
And as I try to order these thoughts as though they were a sequence of events, I realize each is my arm.  Which comes first; the right or the left?  Are you sure?
All of these are parts of who I truly am, today,

The warmth of my bare bosom
The cold strands across my shoulders
This is the truth

I will never be weak.  I will never be weak again.  I can't. It isn't me.  and I'm not you.
and yet because of this, I'm happy enough to love you.