I don’t understand how you think
that you can give advice
without understanding my battle.
You state what I know,
and what I felt
aren’t possible.
Don’t you know?
I am impossible.
My imagination is so vivid,
sometimes I want to escape
into it, and ride my thoughts
like unicorns.
Other times, I want to shut it
out, hearing ghosts of my past
screaming at me, and asking
why I didn’t do it better.
I see demons in a person’s
smile, interactions laced
with feigned friendliness,
and the constant question:
whether the colors that surround
them, taking up their negative
spaces, are correlated, in any way,
to their basic alignment.
Mine is a bright green today,
swirling around me like a sentient
fog, a miasma of tendrils that curl,
and twist into pleasing, circular
shapes.
Telling me that I cannot have
been, when I was, is denial,
and what you deny me
is acceptance, and I’ve
told you before that it’s
more important than
understanding.
I try to understand myself. I feel it first,
and then discover: I am happy, sad,
angry, emboldened, giddy, somber,
guilty, or any other multitude of emotions
in combinations that often contradict,
or strengthen one end of the spectrum,
or the other.
I reflect and try to understand the
cause of my stirring, and probe at memories
to see if I can understand how I might
start to fix it.
And you ask me if I was still her.
Yes. I am her, she is me, we together
make up who I am. I won’t pretend
I fully understand in my creation of characters,
who they are or what they mean to me,
but when you ask me if it was her,
or if it was me through her,
I say both.
You don’t get to tell me
it isn’t possible. Any artist puts
themselves into their work, even
when they have no part in the story,
it just happens that way.
I learn about myself
through what I create:
reflect, edit, reshape,
understand, and make better.