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

Sinners

My first thought
is of the sheer quantity of people
gathered to make an unpopular point.
We walk.

As we walk, I see my present
juxtaposed over my past
moving into my future.
Temple spires reach
toward a god I no longer believe in.
That god damned me for my decisions,
condemned me for my friends,
judged me for my lack of belief.

We reach the end of our march,
the top of a hill.
I can see more from up here. 
The journey is far from over,
but we have made it this far.
We won't stop now.

Criminal

I watch him scrape the ice off the railings,
boredom the only excuse for his crime.
I want to scream out at him to
Stop. Don't destroy the beautiful things.
They will end in their own time.
But I don't.
I let him have his destruction
and silently mourn what's been lost.

Yesterday I cut my hair.
I can't shed my lifestyle as easily as I discarded
those strands of myself,
watching the inches fall to the ground.
And Abby sweeps them up, throws them away,
never to be part of me again.

Ghost

Confusion,
comfort,
chest to back,
head to shoulder,
breath down spine,
against skin,
the smell of laundry
old houses
faded cologne
and marijuana
oddly comforting.

Shift in bed,
fear and uncertainty
the state of my sanity.

Not wrong,
but familiar.

Haunting.

Walk

          tread carefully
            over the bodies 

                     of the dead

     if you listen too hard 

    they may convince you
they are better off that way

                                or that you 

                               would be too

Anniversary

It's been 93 days since you broke up and apparently you're still not over it because you're still counting.
You still hurt.
You buy new clothes as though he'll see you in them tonight and compliment you the way he used to, telling you how beautiful you are before you undress each other.
You wear pajamas that are really lingerie and tell yourself that you don't wear it for him, but for someone else like him who will eventually enter your life.
You tell yourself someone else like him will eventually enter your life.
You delete notes on your phone. In an alternate life you would have kept them for sentimental reasons.
You wonder if he got the postcard you sent him and if that made it harder.
You wonder what he did with the drawer of your things at his place. You told him to throw out everything in it, but you don't know if he actually did.
You remember his chest pressing into your back, and the steadiness of his breathing at odds with the arrhythmic beat of your heart.
You listen to Taylor Swift breakup songs and convince yourself that you feel better knowing other people have felt this way too.
You don't delete his address from your phone.
You spend a night in bed with one of your high school friends. You curl yourself up against his body, you tangle your legs with his, you touch his face and let him touch yours. You know it doesn't mean anything, you know there's no commitment, you don't care. You don't want to commit either.
You tell yourself you don't wish it had lasted longer. You tell yourself that it's for the best. You tell yourself that you're okay. You lie to yourself every day so you can get out of bed.
You're afraid that you will try to heal your bruised heart by pounding it against a closed door or pressing it into the skin of a stranger.
You're afraid because this is as far ahead as you had planned and now you have no excuse to keep holding on.
You say you want this anniversary to be the last one that crosses your mind.
You think that it can't be an anniversary if it didn't even last a year.

Bus Ride

The wheels on the bus go round and round,
like the children's song said they would.

The song didn't tell the children that when they became
too old
to ride the bus,
they might watch another person load a car with shopping bags
they can't afford.

How one day at the grocery store they might overhear
a white man talk down to a Hispanic woman
and realize an ugly truth.
That they might start exploring their sexuality
and learn things
others want them to hide.

The song didn't mention
blades of grass,
run over by hundred of feet every day,
each a unique beauty destroyed.
It didn't mention the sun
and the heat
they would feel
when they stepped off the bus.

The song didn't tell them
what life would be like off the bus
or that they are never too old
to ride it.

First Love

It is her first flight and she is excited; she has never flown before. Others told her what to expect, but she was still unprepared for what it would actually feel like.

At takeoff, her heart jumps, lifting with the plane as it leaves the ground. It moves so much faster than she anticipated; surely this is impossible. But it isn’t. Eventually she becomes used to the rhythm of the plane, and it calms her. Like falling asleep under the comforting weight of his arm, flying isn’t as hard as she thought it would be.

Partway through the flight, the plane begins to bounce. She is scared because she cannot do anything to stop it. This time her heart beats differently. Faster. Out of fear rather than exhilaration. Like walking home alone in the dark, she has no other choice.

But the plane doesn’t crash. Eventually the air becomes smooth again, and she appreciates it more for having known the fear. She thinks, I could get used to this.

Finally she can feel the plane begin to descend. Again, there is nothing she can do to stop it. They land abruptly, and her first flight ends the way it began, with a hug at the door and a kiss on the forehead.

Summer

Too close.
Everything is still too close.

It took fifteen minutes for me to realize what hypothetical meant.
We always said the future was a hypothetical. Nothing is ever for certain,
but I wanted this hypothetical to be real.
But hypothetical equals false.

Love is every cliche. I didn’t know it could hurt this much.
We tried, but it didn’t get us where I wanted us to go.
Always running out of time. I didn’t realize it until time was up.
Love is a bitch. We always lose in the end.

This prompt is too close. I shouldn’t have tried so soon.
I wish this could all be further away.