I am cramped.
I am shoved into this tiny space.
A war rages outside,
Mother tells me it is safer,
My heart tells me she is protecting me.
Anger seems futile,
Death by emotional suffocation.
I am cramped.
Shoved;
Into
This,
Space,
Under,
The,
Stairs,
I have not grown up under the stairs,
I have been told it is safer under here.
My life is lived in a small cluttered place, filled to the brim with emotional baggage. Boxes labeled and relabeled as I sit bored with a Sharpie.
If I cross the old title out enough, the memories will become as hidden as secrets taken to the grave.
In one of the boxes my Old Self is.
She is so small-looking to me now.
In the dead of night,
When the tears fall internally,
I creep downstairs and find her.
She is in the one cardboard box that is not labeled.
Dust covered,
Inside,
She looks terrified?
No
Panicked?
No
Deathly afraid?
No
Horrified?
No
Fearful?
No
Traumatized
That is what she is.
I whisper it to her,
Her name makes her young round face weighted down by secrets, and the scary things that go bump in the night;lift and alleviate away.
“Trauma”
I say softly,
She looks at me.
Her lips are bloody,
A drop runs down to her chin.
Her fingers are coated with the godly liquid that fills our veins,
Eyes sunk into a relapse of a loop of time.
She twitches and looks over her shoulder, at the imaginary demons that only exist in her mind demanding she do so,
Her eyes glass over,
Her body becomes both weightless and immovable,
Ragged breaths make her thin frame tremble,
She is falling into this pit that can never ever be exited.
“Trauma”
I whisper her name,
She is becoming smaller.
“Trauma”
Blood flows back into her split lip.
“Trauma”
She stops shaking, she is young again, pulled from the relapse of memory,
One now clean hand cups my cheek.
“You know my name,” she says.
