Trauma

Trauma is not knowing if I can accept your love for fear it will leave me. Trauma is not knowing if I can accept your love for fear it will tear me apart from the inside out. Trauma rests inside me, like a rotting disease. Trauma is saying “sorry, I can’t love you, I don’t know how.” Trauma is saying “I’m sorry, I can’t accept your love because I fear it’s not real. “ Trauma is pain disguised as protection of ones self. Trauma rids us of the love we want most.- M.D.L

Sadness and me

Wallowing in gloom, this feeling fills this room. Don’t be sad they all say but they aren’t the ones who have tried to get away. Ive tried several times to escape, the sadness hangs over me like a drape. I’m no contest for sadness so I’ll just sink further into this mattress. I let it consume me, swallow me whole, I just give up all control. It won’t let me be free we have some type of bond, sadness and me. Sadness tells me it’s okay to feel, to let down my guard and be real. I don’t want to feel this way anymore so I try and close the door. The door to this madness, to the overwhelming sadness. The door is always cracked, waiting for how I’ll react. I just wanna leave with happiness in tact. Sadness is something that must be, it’s simply a part of me. Don’t be sad they all say, like it’s something that can just go away. The sadness in me is here to stay.

COVID

I often see several smiles being suppressed under a fabric that connects around the ears of its owner. It has made me realize how much smiles can mean. There are people I have met with just eyes, the rest of their facial expressions a guessing game. Men can no longer tell women to smile more and maybe that’s a win for feminism. I see just half faces. I forgot what teeth look like and often wonder if teeth whitening sales have gone down. It’s like having a secret, I may only ever know your eyes and the way they crinkle around the curved rim of a mask when you laugh or how they dart back and forth when I can’t keep your attention. I’ll tell my children one day, maybe that when I met their father in the good old Walmart we were six feet apart and I saw nothing but his eyes. I knew he was human by the way he stared at me peeping over the wired rimmed cloth, what romance. I see people budging in store lines, not saying please and thank you. I wonder if it’s because we are just eyes, there is no frown to be seen, no disappointment just a furrow of a brow, eyes turned to slits of anger. Some of the eyes have names that I can’t remember because there is no whole picture, no cheekbones, freckles that dance on top of those cheekbones or smile lines to be seen, to prove to me that they have captured joy. There’s a saying I heard once that goes: “you can tell a lot by someone’s eyes”. I wonder if the author of this saying covered up literally half of all the faces of everyone they met to discover this or if they were just disregarding how well someone’s smile can compliment the light in their eyes. Does anyone even bothers to smile in the first place anymore? If no one can see flashes of teeth or lips turned upward why bother? I feel muffled, suppressed and when I remove this thin piece of fabric from my ears, releasing my mouth from its cage it feels a lot like taking off a bra or slipping out of a pair of boots after a long days work. This very fabric, this muzzle if you will, made to protect me has distanced me from the rest of the world as if to say “careful she bites”. The thin piece of fabric is good for hiding my lip singing in the grocery store and keeping my nose from getting frostbite. However it’s a constant reminder of death and the need to be protected in a world that rarely offers none. There’s no smiles here anymore. People are losing their lives and we are gripping our wired fabric like a life preserver. I never thought I would live in a world where we all wear masks in more ways than one.

April

April brings white flurries and brisk morning air. They say “April showers brings May flowers” I often wonder if April snow has its promises of growth too. It seems only frigid, a slap in the face to spring. April and spring being scorned lovers and we just victims of their affair. On and off, on and off again. Small glimpses of sunshine arise only to be squandered by snowfall. This affair is all too much and I find myself pining for the glimpses of sun. April is a cruel mistress to spring oh how I long for the flowers may will bring.

My love

Sometimes the love I have for you gets trapped inside my body. It can’t escape my lips to form perfect poetic sonnets and crucifies itself on my uvula instead. It can’t pour out of my fingertips to touch your skin, perfectly, lightly causing goosebumps to rise on your arms like mountains. I am not the best lover, I’m lost in deep madness often which can shift and bend thoughts inside my head like a forever turning kaleidoscope. I want the love to escape me, to land on you softly caressing your soul because you deserve the world or at least the sacrificial giving of my soul. I love you through it all, the shifting and bending of my mind. I love you when my words say differently, when my volume is turned up and spitting anger from my lips at you for insignificant things. Even then, my heart whispers love, love, love trying to calm the passion that rages and boils in my gut. Love is tricky inside this body of mine. My body is greedy, afraid and menacing, it wants to keep the love I made to itself, avoiding vulnerability. The love inside me is refusing to be strangled and mauled by fear, it fights to escape and regurgitate itself to you. It was made for you, this love inside me. It escapes in bits and pieces, in fragments of “have a good day”, “drive safely”. My love for you is deep and I feel it here often, it exists and it comes in big waves to remind me. In case this love never escapes in the way I want it to, in case you don’t feel it deep within the marrow of your bones, I hope you know I’m choking on the love I have for you all the time. My soul screams to touch yours. Because with out love we have nothing -M.D.L

Perception is key

I loved you even when I didn’t and I think there’s magic in that. Loving someone simply for the version you created of them is a testament to how badly we can yearn for something. Love always has to be a “despite all the odds” kind of thing, even the odds we turn our blinders on for then ask why we were so blind. I saw no odds just you in good lighting, your soul tilted just right. Loving you was never hard, the relationship between you and my brain made it easy. The power our brains have over every inch of our reality is suffocating, squeezing out every inch of the truth and replacing it with smoke and mirrors. Perception is a son of a bitch. Twisting, turning, weaving lies that may be truths or truths that may be lies. I never knew where the version I made up of you started and the real you ended. Maybe that’s the problem with make believe, it eventually rots into reality. I wonder what version of you you’d be if I didn’t concoct this mirage of you in head. My heart has finally shouted imposter....The charade is now over. It can’t trick itself any longer you are you and I am me and our love depends on the perception of it all.

The pieces that built me

I mourn for the parts of me that I didn’t know I lost. The parts that I have shoved my fingers deep down into myself to find; wiggled around, searching for something. For healing? For understanding? I shove my fingers deep, down in the trenches of me until they are covered with blood, until I scream out loud with agony. I have to feel something, is this it? Is this what’s buried deep down in my soul? It comes up sometimes; the pieces, like vomit onto my living room floor only it’s not vomit. It’s tears that flood and flood mixed with dry heaving that prevents me from breathing. I cried an ocean once, or at least it felt like it. My living room carpet was wet, my hair, my perfectly done make up staining my cheeks. I cried so much I wished someone would send a life boat to my door step or open the door and let all the water out. I can’t understand these pieces or maybe I don’t want to. Is this pain? Sadness? Anger? Where does it come from? So deep within me that half the time I don’t realize it’s there until it is... like a long car ride to a new home in some new place you have never been with your trunk full of luggage. Like showing up for yourself for the first time but not knowing you were missing in the first place. I didn’t know these parts of me were missing. The vulnerable, sad, pained, scared parts. Where do they go when Im not forced to let them out? I have so many different parts. My fingers could explore my own body for days and never even touch the depths of what’s inside. That’s a scary concept, being a stranger to bits and pieces of your own being. What parts of me is this? What if I get stuck here in the version of myself that cries oceans and heaves up nothing but air on my living room floor with the blinds closed? What would people think then? What would people think of me If this door didn’t exist? If there wasn’t walls or windows protecting my insides, like my own perfect house. My grass is green, my bushes pruned every year but what if my roots are rotting? What if there’s worms,spiders, and weeds? What if my very foundation is cracking? Would they choose to sit in my garden then? To lay down on my grass and stare into my sun? To step inside for tea and deep conversations? Would I? Maybe that’s the important question: would I still choose to see the beauty in all these pieces of myself? The beauty in this house I built? If I cried rivers to water this grass..and let cracks roam in my foundation would I still love me then? I keep digging around inside, grabbing around for something tangible, for something that makes sense of all these pieces. Information that makes sense of how I can be so whole yet need so many internal repairs. The only thing I discovered is that I must step inside and have tea and deep conversations with myself more often. -M.D.L