Letter From A Daughter

A Poem By Mikayla Jane

“Home is wherever your heart is,” they say, but my heart lives far from my chest.
It beats 72 times a minute,
89 when he’s around, 103 when you’re around.

I’m one single bite of bagel and two, no, three, cups
of bitter black coffee to wake my enervated brain because
“Your brain is wider than the sky” they say,
but my brain is 90 miles south of the deepest Atlantic Ocean,
swallowed under half-a-billion drops of water,
screaming for just anyone to hear that;
I AM 43 FORGOTTEN MEMORIES but
if you gape into my hazel-kissed eyes you’ll see them, they’re hidden there, because “Eyes are the windows to your soul” they say,
and my eyes are dark with those 43 obliterated secrets.
They memorize
64 faces each day,
51 to never be seen again,
yours to never be unseen.
I am 215 pauses before words but 430 syllables
to never leave a forced smile unwilling sitting on my dishonorable skin but “Everyone is the same on the inside” they say,

yet if that were even briefly believed
I wouldn’t have lost
5 friends in the 2nd grade,
to 4 parents blind to beauty,
and 1 who simply wouldn’t nor couldn’t give me a chance.
Somehow you still allowed me to think it was bound to get
better-
God!
“Better” I hate that word.
It always lies, always tells me that someday
I’ll smile brighter,
laugh louder,
leap higher,
dream longer,
breathe deeper,
that someday I won’t feel so Goddamn exhausted because
of what better told me.
And you let me believe.
You.
Those 31 million 536 thousand seconds,
times 17 years, that’s...

536 million 112 thousand wasted beats
I thought the lies held inside the hourglasses of perfect promises
would never leave the lips of you.
My hero.
All the inordinate numbers orbiting our existence
I can only dwell on one-one.
The one who always knew how to locate my heart.
The one who could look me in the eyes and tell me; “It’ll get better.”
The one who preached anyone who didn’t see past my skin was
as ignorant as a dictionary left unopened,
and a story left untold.
But,
Dad?
I don’t know where to go anymore.
I don’t know who to talk to,
what to say, what to tell them
because they let me down, no, you let me down,
down, further than my brain in the seabeds,
cloudy with loss, bursting at the seams to let it finally be known that
Home? My home is not a place because I am drifting on floating air.
Eyes? My eyes are only windows to the dreams I wish for at 11:11 each night because a small superstition like that can give a girl enough
hope to last just a little longer.
But tell me everyone is the same on the inside,
and I’ll laugh.
If that were true,
I would have known.
That not everyone who leaves your life has passed away,
that some choose to.
That you chose to.
If they told me the reality of heartbreak?
I would have been born my own warrior.
Instead of trying to be yours.