it takes years of scribbling and screaming and crying and creating until i give up on peacefulness. i tore myself into strips of paper and i wrote them all down, but i could never read those frayed words again. i say: 

mama, i am a book of half-sentences and endless dreams that never saw the sun. 

mama, my story is a graveyard. we are the ghosts, but the only thing we haunt is ourselves.

mama, i don't remember you like i should. but maybe that’s for the better. i don’t have to feel anything about the pain in your eyes when you start to wonder who it is you’re looking at. i don’t have to feel anything about all the tears we’ve shed for you, undeserving, uncaring, untruthful. 

for if i lie to myself, it is your fault. you who taught me dishonesty, you who dug the first several graves and dumped the first several corpses, you who shushed me when i mourned, you who snuffed the candles out when i tried to hold vigil. 

i am the stranger wearing your daughter's face. this body is a burial ground and we have grieved ourselves hundreds of times.

you will never know this pain, but maybe i want you to. maybe i have always wanted you to be the one shedding tears, grieving in secret, suffering in silence no matter how shrilly you scream. 

my grief didn’t teach me gratitude, and yours will not teach you. cut from the same cloth they say, made of the same stars. we grew up inhaling the same chemicals, taking the same poison; and so i know that my rage was your rage, will be my daughter’s rage should i have one.

we will never have a daughter, you took that from us. what’s one more dream to die in the damp underground?

i still scribble and scream, still cry and create. but “i” have given up on peacefulness, and i will never let you forget it.