cue the performance.
I'm a professional at deceiving myself into believing
I'm capable of giving and receiving love, but I'm nothing
more than a little girl who's living off expired dreams
that've acquiesced to schemes deemed necessary in this
constant struggle not to be alone. I've got a way to
swagger and sway with my feet bound in stilletto heel
that can steal male attention like they're willing to pay
for a glimpse at the glamour I've got hidden away beneath
long-legged entrances and seizing the day. I'm twenty years
aging and double that old, my clothes are never folded and I
can't get ahold of this self I've grown to esteem and uphold.
I'm dichotymous and autonomous, making decisions to seem
proactive and to avoid inactivity more than due to a proclivity
for being bold. I move forward to avoid looking back because
the black tunnel that follows is a reminder of how hollow I used
to be, and I've chosen not to wallow in this gray and slow
existence as it would surely swallow me whole.
You stole my sense of feeling and now I'm dealing with
the emptiness that grows inside when there's no one
to bear witness and nowhere to hide- I try to sidestep
the future and stitch up the seams, mend the fraying fabric
and tend to the the scrapes and scratches I've got pending
all the time. I no longer know what's mine. Are you okay? I hear
them say and every day, "I'm fine I'm fine." I'm a mass of
contradictions, full of conviction but these wounds are
self-inflicted and I've restricted myself to living in a
fictive world of what others have depicted I should be.
I wanted my life to be unscripted, but my performance can't be
lifted above sub-par, and even though I feel as though I've
come so far, I still scar too easily, and I can't seem
to get you out of my mind.
I hope to find the strength that will allow me to unwind,
bend, let go, send my memories to their end and find peace
somewhere inside, render myself stable, able to get rid of the
place where I let myself hide when the tides are coming quickly
and I need to bide my time until I can see the sun approaching
on my left-hand side. I am full of these private places,
dark spaces in which I trace the outlines of all the faces that
shine dimly in my memory--of all the boys who were ever mine,
even for those short amounts of time, and all the hours spent
waiting, all the showers spent hating my body for those regrets
formed too late to say no.
I retreat into these areas that welcome me in defeat
and as I lay, lonely, bare, I hope someone out there wants to
meet the little girl with her feet curled beneath her, beaten
and broken, and without spoken word or letting her be woken,
help her begin to heal from every token of the pain
she's had to feel, and allow her to reconcile her fractured
world to make the one that she's wanted become
the one that is real.