Healing Looks Like This
I feel like life is just one season of healing after another, and sometimes the healing isn’t even fully formed. The bones aren’t even mended back into their original place before something ruptures again, and we have to go through the same agonizing steps all over again. Taking care of the break. Mending the bone. Standing on our own two feet like we didn’t just relearn this three months ago. It almost never ends.
So we cope. We do something to fix the pain. We try to heal the hurt. We find ways to numb the never-ending horrors of healing. And maybe if we name it, if we understand the shape of it, it won’t feel so heavy. Generally speaking, the body heals in four stages: bleeding, inflammation, proliferation, and remodeling. First, the break. Then the swelling. Then the slow, invisible work of regrowth. And then, if you’re lucky, your body becomes something stronger in the same place it once split wide open.
That’s what this post is. Three poems written from different stages of healing. The breaking. The reaching. The release. None of them are polished. None of them pretend the work is done. Just fragments from the process of putting myself back together.
Hate Myself
I feel like an idiot.
An idiot for loving you.
If I took all the fucked up things you said
and wrote them down,
people would think I made them up.
I hate myself for believing you.
I think I might hate myself
for letting you treat me like a placeholder,
lukewarm and unforgettable.
I let myself fall in love with you,
even though I knew better.
Maybe I deserve this pain.
I’m not sure who I was in the life before this,
but I think she was awful too.
Maybe I always was.
How deep can grief go?
How much can one body store
before it spills out everywhere?
I think I’m dying :)
Maybe No One
I’m going to keep writing poems
until these words rip off the page
and slap me with some sense.
Since you’ve been gone,
I’ve been different.
My body half-lilted off this planet,
transported through some kind of
never-ending black hole.
I orbit the ache.
No gravity left in these bones,
just memory and muscle
trying to mimic what it meant to be held.
Sometimes I whisper into this void,
just to see if something will whisper back.
A name, maybe. A reason.
But it’s always just me.
And this pen.
And the silence.
Maybe I’m not meant to make sense of this.
Maybe I’m not meant to be answered.
Maybe the call goes out
and no one ever comes.
Maybe no one was ever supposed to.
Reflection
When I showed up on Friday,
I was tired. The kind of tired
that makes it hard to even feel.
A year goes by too fast,
and somehow still manages
to change everything.
Change doesn’t ask.
It uproots.
A scab I won’t let heal.
I keep my fists clenched,
standing on the front porch of my heart,
yelling at memories to get off my lawn.
But the truth is,
I miss them.
I keep them.
I let them haunt me
because I don’t know who I am without them.
Still, something softened here.
I hope to take away power.
Intuition.
Strength in the self
that’s always been there.
I heard this truth this weekend.
I’m taking away purpose.
Empowerment.
The knowing
that I can be the very thing I desire.
This weekend, I sat with myself.
Mourned myself.
Let silence settle on my skin like rain,
and didn’t rush to wipe it away.
I listened to new truths
and didn’t flinch.
Not the same voices
as the devils on both my shoulders.
No.
These voices are mine.
And they told me
I’m coming back to life.
Maybe not all at once,
but piece by piece.
The light crawled across a dark room.
I’m not waiting anymore.
And that’s enough
to begin.
