i have never had a hope so desperate than that my mother will love me. i was raised on agony, on irritation, on resentment, on fury, on words laced with violence. i held suffering close to my chest and prayed desperately for things to get better.
but kindness from you was a dagger in the back, a hug embraced with terror when you’d finished going down the list of everything you hated about me, when you’d decided you were bored of adding to my ever growing self loathing.
i haven’t felt like you loved me since i was 14. i spent so much of my youth hiding away every real part of myself from you so that the next time you needed to take your anger out on me, it wouldn’t ache quite so deeply, so that you were only hurting a ghost.
i guess i forgot that ghosts come back to haunt and you have created a poltergeist inside of me. a monster to carry out your destruction, and it has done your job so well. it wreaks havoc from the inside out. when it tires of shredding me apart internally, it does so much worse.
sometimes, i am possessed. in those moments, i see you in myself so clearly and i have never felt pain so sharp as i lash out at those who love me as i watch myself lash out and lash out and lash out. and i am begging myself to stop.
but i am possessed and when i regain control over my own body the damage has been done and i am left alone, knees to my chest in the wreckage, holding that intimate suffering close like it is all i have ever known.
i hate you. i despise you with every ounce of myself and yet i can’t let go of that stupid– desperate fucking hope that someday, someday you will see everything you’ve done to me and you will beg for my forgiveness, and when you say sorry you will mean it and you will love me as i have never known before. but it will be this poltergeist and i forever.
at the very least i wish i could let you go. but i have never been very good at letting things go and everything taken from me is left with claw marks gouged from my shaking hands. and i learned that, on some level, from you.
-z.s.
