you & me

Peace Poetry: I Do Not Have to Do Everything My Mind Tells Me To.

 

There was a war inside me. It was loud and it was ugly and it was violent.

Me against me and there was no winner. But I am ending the battle.

I made peace with myself in the skeptical surrender. Five point five feet deep and barely breathing. Surrounded, on my knees. My illusive advantage lost. Secrets have no power. No one to carry out the haunted, husk of a person I had become. Crouched over clawing into the dirt, my shoulder blades slicing through my skin, my throat too dry to cry out.

Maybe I chose to wave the flag or maybe it was my only choice. Before my mind imploded and the world unloaded the full weight of its wickedness. Before my esophagus exploded and my hair forever reeked reefer. Learning to tolerate the intolerable without drawing blood. Not needing the scar to prove there was pain.

I made peace with myself in the reckless. In the bottomless mimosas. My toes bleeding in the EDM concerts as the bass wrung out the toxins. Getting dangerously lost on the mountain peak as the sun sank. Breaking his ribs to keep his broken heart beating. I found myself because I recklessly lost myself.

I made peace with myself when I left you. When I stopped trying to explain. Affirming your prayers that sounded like unsolicited criticism of my freest parts. I grew tired of starving the wild that leaked through my eyelids, my paper skin. Spending hours trimming and flushing the transgressions that threatened to trespass your suffocating boundaries.

Guilty tears at your toes, I wore bigger shirts to hide the empty space between my bones. I had no reason to put my weapons down. You loved me in spite of my war, or maybe because of it. So you could save me, hide me, be the hero.

I swallowed your sanctimonious disapproval and unwarranted pity thrown publicly at my naked back when I boarded the plane. And I gave away that hallowed green dress I’d never fit into beside another.

I made peace with myself inside your office. Threats and expectations I defied with apathy. Contracts I had no intention of holding up and journals I lied in. Did you believe me? The labels I accepted. Take these, twice a day, you’ll feel better. Imbalanced. I made peace with myself when I asked for help. When I started showing my face in the waiting room even though you expected me not to.

I fed into your whiteboard of feelings, and I stopped paying to lie to you. I took a breath in and then out came a wretched scream, and you said do it again. Shattered silence by the words afraid of air.

I make peace with myself on my Yoga mat every day. Off-centered ocean breaths one, two, three, four… What number am I at again? Did I put enough quarters in the parking meter? I am breathing in. This pose is uncomfortable, I am breathing out. I made peace with myself the day I realized I do not have to do everything my mind tells me to. So I bent my knees, I skipped a Vinyasa, I rested in Child’s pose.

I learned I do not have to follow every thought. The obsessions, the assumptions, the judgments. It’s commentary, the story I tell myself. Chaturanga, up-dog, down-dog. Five breaths. Sometimes I blame myself for these thoughts, but these thoughts are not my fault. I cannot stop them, but I can choose to not listen to them.

Guiding myself gently back to my breath, I’m reminded on that sweaty overpriced strip of rubber that I am impermanent.

I made peace with myself tangled sideways in your bed. Blankets kicked on the floor and pillows shoved between bed frame and wall. The clock unplugged and raindrops streaming down the 6th floor hotel window. Bare warm silence. Familiar, unadorned touch. You gently pushed away my untied hair from falling into your open mouth as we kissed.

The fighting has stopped now, and I am free. Some things have been lost forever and life is left in disarray. Most of what is left needs to be rebuilt, and I am still quick to fire my weapon on the days when I forget it’s over. My peace is not a lack of sadness or conflict, it is that even on my worst days, I can hold the pain.

***

Kelsey Burns asks too many questions. She sins daily and gets lost constantly. Her first word was “more” and she lives life looking for it. A short time ago, she began her career as a hospice nurse California.

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Rebelle Society

Rebelle Society

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