Today at breakfast, before work, an old family friend had a sit-down with me and asked me how I was sincerely doing. Automatically I wanted to lie, I had the innate urge to tell her there was nothing I wanted to share… But then she brought up that my late mother’s birthday was this passed Saturday, the 26th.

She asked if I went to the cemetery to see her, to talk to her, and I told her I had. But then she frowns and asked me if I felt any better after or if I was just doing it because that made things seem normal. The more I steeped in the question the more I recognized I never liked going to my mother’s grave and I explained this to her. To which she simply said, “Then forget about going at all.” And I didn’t understand; aren’t you supposed to go see someone’s grave when they die? Aren’t you supposed to mourn them?

“Your mom did a lot of bad things, selfish things. So I want you to be selfish, I want you to take care of yourself and not someone who’s been dead almost eight years.”

Still, I didn’t quite understand… She was my mom. I found it right to go ‘see’ her. But then again… It never did anything to sate my emotions, it wouldn’t make me happier, it wouldn’t help me forgive her any sooner.

“After eight years, Fallyn, maybe it’s time you should live for yourself.”

A bold suggestion, if ever I’d heard one. So as I sipped my coffee and considered this woman I rarely got to chat with, I realized:
I had to let it go. One way or another, in forgiving my mother I would therein forgive myself. Or so I’d heard. And after all this time I’d been clinging to the essence that all of this was MY doing, MY burden… When in reality she’d afflicted more people than I care to admit.

The one thing Paulette made me understand today over breakfast is that I don’t have to support a dead woman anymore, mother or no. I can focus on myself, on those around me. But primarily, I should always be selfish and love who I am becoming.

To the person I wish I could love,

Sometimes, I look up to the same stars,
Comparing them to the ones in your gaze
Yes, the gaze I’d never known
The gaze I long for,
The very looks I wish we could share across a crowded room
The eyes I’ve seen so many times when I go to sleep
Assuring me with glances that all is well with the world

Sometimes, when I am alone,
I twist and untwist my fingers,
Wondering if you do the same?
Do you pretend to hold my hand too?

Or is that awful?
Is that weird?
Is that abnormal for a person to be imagining?

Sometimes, when the nights are the coldest
I like to imagine you’re here at my side
That we share pleasant memories
That maybe, just maybe, I am not as alone as I picture myself to be

Dearest muse that eludes my quill,

Do you like the words I pour out of my veins?
The ink that smears across the paper,
Carved out of my very soul with all the tenderness of a martyr

Do you?
Can you?
Will you?

Will there never be satisfaction in the sentiments you spin,
The critiques you spit
The woes you slur
How – when – tell me,
What will please you?
These words are all I can regard you with
In inspiration,
In adoration,
In all of it

To the one staring back in the mirror,
You needn’t look so far for love after all

Perhaps if I could infect those G R E A T E R than myself
I would feel a little worth more than the useless L E S S than myself,

It was similar to a beggar seeking yet another bottom of an endless bottle.
It was similar to a beast clawing its way back for another needle.
It was similar to a misanthropic nurse who pulled the tourniquet too tight and left you to suffocate.

Maybe if I watched them seize enough,
If I watched them grapple unwittingly,
Wantonly,
Stupidly,
For all these things long enough,
Maybe I would understand then,
They’d told me.

Did they,
Each of them who told me to pass a bottle or one needle too strong,
Forget that I was raised by the same lies &. same faces?
The same tender hands that would sooner be fists &. gauntlets than a kind touch?
The same swirling voices that spoke so beautifully in a tongue of miasma that was laced with false promises?
The same accusations &. screams that gaslight my terrors throughout the years?

“Addictive personality”,
I think,
Can mean many things these days.

It will not mean I will fall to their plight,
I will not be marked down on some crumbling epitaph in the same manner.

I believe it means they are all too engaged in this pretense of “vulnerability” I exude,
As false a claim as this is,
And if they really wish to see what M E N T A L is,
They have yet to see it.

If they want to taste morphine, they will have it;
Slow like a kindling burn aching in their souls and marrow.

If they want to have heroine, they will have it;
Cauterizing every atrium and ventricle in them until they are fit to burst at the seams.

… Laughable, at best, to compare my own personality to drugs
However,
A misanthropic nurse has to do what they do B E S T.