I AM ESSAY
I was strong, confident, happy. I was open, warm,whole. I am broken, bruised, discouraged. I am scarred, fallen, afraid. I am the lost love between older brother and younger sister. I am the absence of secrets shared at midnight between close sisters. I am the abstract noun in a life-changing situation. I am the mask every person has, filtered, disoriented, chipped. I am struggling, beneath the waves. I am not the birds singing in the morning, but rather a fleeting memory, lost, alone, and unwelcome. I am not waiting for my happy ending anymore, but rather just an ending. They say that everything is going to be fine, and 15 years I’ve waited. They speak in riddles, tongues I do not understand.
They lie and thieve, robbing me blind, taking a piece of me. It was that piece stolen that destroyed me, but I guess then I’ve always been destroyed. I am the one broken key on a beautiful piano… forgotten. I have whispers in my ear, and demons in my head, and I can’t get them out. I have regrets and sorrows. I am the scars on my arm, born of pain, but the scars and pain are like spacing between words—familiar, everyday expectations. I am not the same girl I was years ago. I feel as if people cover their mouth and point as I say, “Please don’t say that. I didn’t use to be this way.” I wish I was first pick, the first one you thought of on a beautiful rainy day. I wish I was not as broken, barely keeping my decaying pieces together.
The demon hides in the scars on my skin and crawls around in my head. It tells me that they never really loved me, that I was never good enough, and it tells me to think I was was feeble-minded and naive, that she gave me up not out of love, but because I was another burden. Saying that she dumped me onto somebody else, that she couldn’t stand to look at me. Because I looked like my father. I have never heard his name uttered from her lips. I have no past to fill me with pride, nor a future where my older siblings scold me. A future I can look forward to. I am the youngest, but I think I have grown up before my time. And in the end, my intentions true, my life laid out before me, I pause. I have one last question.
Am I the situation that made me?
-Erin Kaufman