When I was 3 years old my mom left me in the car to drop something off where my dad was working. They got caught up in conversation and 10 minutes later, my dad asked where I was. I imagine my mom saying “Oh, shit” and running out to the car with her heart in her throat, or maybe her stomach. She found me strapped into my carseat, red-faced and screaming. 

I imagine my dad, a young man of 28, holding me, his first child, for the first time. I imagine him thinking She’s perfect. I will always protect her. Perhaps he had suppressed his own trauma and abuse. Perhaps he simply hadn’t thought it was an issue, since this was the expected next step for him. He had no way of seeing how much damage his unresolved trauma would cause. If he did, he wouldn’t have had kids, right? 

My father shouldn’t have had children. I have five siblings. 

What if on that day twenty-two years ago, it had been a few degrees hotter? What if another coworker had stopped to talk to my dad before my mom got there? What if he hadn’t noticed my absence so quickly? 

What if I had died, baked in a car only a few feet away from my parents? 

Would my dad have blamed my mom? Would the loss of me have separated them only a few years into marriage? I think my mom was pregnant with my younger brother then. Maybe they wouldn’t have had any more children. My brother could have grown up switching between parents on the weekends, having to deal with my mother’s guilt and my father’s detachment, and the rest of us would have been spared the pain they’ve been carrying for the last two decades. Maybe they would have been spared this painful existence. My mom wouldn’t call the cops on my brothers because they wouldn’t be there to fight her husband. My sister wouldn’t pull a kitchen knife across her wrists because she would never have existed. And I would be dead, blinking out of existence in the time it takes for a car to heat up under a hot summer sun. My poor brother. 

I’ll never know what would have happened. If I had died, I still wouldn’t know what happened. But it doesn’t matter. This is what did happen. I am alive, and I have 5 younger siblings I don’t know how to support.

Not even 3 months since they separated, barely over one since my mom filed for divorce, and my sister is graduating from bootcamp. When Xander and I pull into the parking lot, I see my dad heading in. Surprisingly for me, my sister has been visiting him since the separation. She feels bad for him because he lost everything. He lost everything because he didn’t think about anyone but himself, I respond, shoving down the part of me that does indeed feel bad for him. 

When we pull into the parking lot, I see my dad heading toward the entrance. “Don’t get out of the car yet,” I say, “I want my dad to get farther ahead so I don’t have to talk to him.”

But when I see him walk alone to another part of the room and ask a stranger if he can sit by them, I can’t help but feel so fucking sorry for him. 

When my mom filed for divorce, her father was the first person she called. I try to imagine that and I can’t. I’ve barely spoken to my father in the last year. I stopped telling him personal information after he kept using it against me.

Part of him is just a 9-year-old boy who was abused and didn’t know how to cope. A bigger part of him, or at least a part that affects me more, is a grown man who manipulates and abuses his children. And I don’t know how to reconcile those parts.

for the barren women

This is good practice for when you have kids, they say.
I'm not going to have children, I say.
You would be a great mother, they say,
as if they know
my childhood,
my young adult trauma,
my mental illness,
me.

Your only purpose is to be a mother,
echoes a voice from my past.
Somewhere between then and now I had forgotten
the only thing that makes a woman worthwhile:
her ability to have children.

I think of Michal, a childless woman.

Long before any spark of my existence was lit,

she spoke too honestly, and was punished
in the worst way her god could conceive of.

I like to imagine she was grateful to her god
that she would never be forced to have a child.

Poison

Time is a poison,
slowly seeping inside you
until you eventually die from it.
All I can decide is what I do
before Time wins.

The Night You Said I Hated You

we went to a party
i wanted to leave early
but we'd had too much to drink
and the uber cost too much

Dysfunction

The anxiety isn't just in my mind anymore.
It's in my throat, choking me, cutting off the air
and I can't breathe.

It's in my lungs, diseasing them,
filling me with the poison that lives in my head,
not just outside,
and I still can't breathe.

It's in my heart, constricting blood flow,
and I still can't breathe.

Left Behind

Fading sunlight jumps from puddle to puddle
chasing clouds
The girl on the train watches
unable to catch up

Not My Last Letter

To He Who Was Briefly My Lover,

You will never read this,
and here I am,
with all the things I will never tell you.

I won't admit I cried myself to sleep
from missing you,
or that I wanted to call
when I stranded myself at the train station.

I won't say that I miss the way you smelled
like coffee,
or the movies we played
but never watched because we were too busy
with each other.


And I won't tell you I've moved on,
that I'm into someone new. 
We were lovers so briefly
before you were gone.
And now I will be too.

From Someone Briefly Loved