guilt trip

it's early june

and i'm beginning to feel okay again

i guess i forgot what it was like

to be alive, and not just living

look at me! i'm alive!

i'm wearing green eyeshadow to match my hair

(tell me, what is more indicative of life than green?)

i'm holding conversations

smoking cigarettes in the parking lot

after open mic poetry

getting high and playing cards

and eating spicy california rolls with my fingers

look mom,

i have friends

pretty friends who enjoy my company

isn't that so strange?

i think i like me.

my reflection doesn't hurt so much, not anymore.

when you look at me, does it hurt?

can you feel it in your shoulder blades, in your hips,

the disillusionment

that comes with a wayward daughter?

mother, there is so much you don't know

so many secrets that sit heavy and cancerous in my throat

but that i must swallow down

for fear you wouldn't hold my hair if i didn't

but i'm still okay

or i was, until dad's cherry cola breath

carried me back to square one

barefoot in the middle of the kitchen, arms crossed,

i absorbed his sugar-coated existential criticisms into myself

and shook with emotions that lack names

took a guilt trip down a dead-end street

(some family vacation)

and now i'm typing out lines of poetry

in my bed while my family prays for me downstairs

they decided i was broken

when i could draw stick figures in the dust on my bible

for months

i figured i'd be better off dead

than a disappointment, a burden

a girl consumed by shame,

made to believe she's incapable of real love

without some savior she can't bring herself to believe in

but no, she is learning that there is no place for shame

in her existence

she is learning that she is sacred

and not because of any blessing,

but because she breathes

she is learning that new beginnings are bitter to taste,

that change is violent,

but that it's worth it. every time.

i am worth it.

(?)