Cradling My Heart After a Knife Fight.
{Photo via Tumblr}
By Megan Smith
“I can truly see how people could feel lonely
enough to kill themselves,” she tells me.
She looks three days
in dirty bed sheets tired,
there are two scars
on the outskirts of her elbows.
She pulls her skin apart
to avoid saying that she is scared.
She tells me she does not know
what she is worth, if anything,
and says that people
make her feel more alone
than loneliness.
She eats scarcely, cries often,
apologizes unnecessarily,
as if she is embarrassed to be unhappy.
And she is.
I find her broken on the couch,
confused by her own confusion,
worried by her own worrying,
lost because she can no longer find
her maps. She speaks fondly of a time when
her maps traced diligently up her ankles.
Now, she hangs upside down
clawing with her fingertips to feel direction.
But gravity has betrayed her far too often.
She would trust it like a feather
praying for wind when her mind
was deceivingly cement.
She says it is the fault of her mother.
She says her mother gave her band-aids
and kisses and pep-talks,
and never told her that she would one day
need to kiss her own heart.
She was never warned
that one day she would wake up,
bleeding elbows,
swollen eyelids,
and she would have to find it
in her own will to empty her bladder,
to clothe herself,
to look in the mirror.
Her mother never told her
that some days, she may not find it.
She has been told that she
can definitely change the world,
but not that it was her responsibility
to believe it.
She feels suspicious of her own mind.
She cannot decide to live only
to second-guess the cost
of the human condition.
She does not recognize this
on the face of the others.
She is consumed in her own emptiness.
There is a space inside of her lungs
too big to swallow.
She cannot taste the isolation
that slurs from the tongues of strangers.
“How are you today?” feels like,
“Why is your heart leaking from your wrists
onto the bathroom floor?” sounds like,
“Why are you so alone?”
I listen, with the beat of my heart,
growing rampant with sorrow.
I know this demon.
It has weighed me down, immovable,
on far too many mornings.
I know she does not have the heart
to feel beautiful.
I know how it feels
to look at the moon and believe
that it may find your shadow unnecessary.
I know how it feels to know
that nobody knows how it feels.
But I have since seen the sunrise in the mountains.
I have since cradled my heart
through knife fights,
I have since told myself
that I am beautiful and somewhere
amidst the rubble of my insecurities,
somehow I believed myself.
And not one single day passes
that I do not remind myself because
it is no one’s responsibility but my own.
And I know poetry
does not fix everything
for everyone.
I know that words are not burning
the insides of everyone,
but I also know that I can recognize myself
inside of her and I want nothing more
than to see her rip the samurai sword of her ribcage
from her throat and say,
“No. I will not choose
to feel this way forever.”
I want to see her
paint her shadow on the sidewalk every night
until it is permanent in the cement,
until no moon can take it away from her.
Most of all, I
do not want to see her cry,
ashamed, when she is told
that she is beautiful.
I want to see her cry
because she knows that is
one hundred percent
the truth.
*****
Megan Smith is a writer, dancer, lover, mover, shaker, and seeker of adventure. She studies object manipulation and movement patterns as a way to express the things her mind does not yet know. She uses poetry to express the things her body is too shy to admit. You could connect with Megan via her website or on Facebook.
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