mother

you’re getting married saturday. you’re marrying the man you deemed better than my father, the man you figured was more suitable for you than three children, a loving husband, a house with large windows and wooden floors that echoed with the clicks of a dog’s nails. the floorboards erupted the morse-code of your heels as i watched you leave me for a final time through a fogged window of my tears that released the salted remains of my self-respect and hope. three years i had let you snap my heartstrings one by one tightening them, my pegs turned too far to keep me up at night as i suppressed my need for my mother; miserably curled in hushed silence and a blanket of shame because i was not enough of a reason for you to stay three years i had let your fingers violently shuffle through my thoughts my blind eyes, calloused fingertips tracing your shadowed figure that once kissed my forehead as i slept, but now looms above, intently damning dreams, casting a shadow that i barely creak my eyes open to see the outlines of. as you walk down the aisle, i hope you remember. i hope you remember him bruising your left hip, blue and purple welts rising from beneath your skin the same way his erection had, blood pumping, veins becoming visible and genitals becoming swollen you allowing his fingers to seize and pluck lustfully as he created you, split your mentality down its seams, your personality undergoing mitosis to create a diseased offspring that could never see the sunlight. i hope you remember walking out of the same front door that you emerged from on your wedding day to slip into his car, as he slipped into you and i collapse, two-thousand-and-twenty-six miles away as if i were only across the street, the sight of betrayal burning into my retinas to forever sear a brand of your name into my chest. your essence is hand-printed across my hippocampus and i wasted years of my life blaming myself as a young fourteen-year-old girl, scraping away my skin to find the word, “FAILURE,” the impending buzzword of this double-letter score, the double-vision of my oedipus complex forever glaring back at me in the mirror wailing that i am not good enough, i am nothing without two parents, that i am six tiles short of spelling out a satisfying life and i should forfeit my letters and gouge out my eyes. but i will not succumb. i have found muscle in this overbearing weight because at fourteen i couldn’t lift a barbell in gym class, my lanky, thin arms pathetically skinny and weak and now i can bench-press enough distress to collapse a ribcage and stop a beating heart. and the clicking of your shoes will cease to exist the dog has died, the floors are cleaner the windows bring in more sunlight than ever before not a tear has been shed in this house for months there’s roses on the table with a note that is not in your handwriting. it’s as if you were never here.