I’m not sure

I’m not sure you understand yet. I’m not sure you understand that this isn’t about you, or what I think of you, or how I really feel about you. This is about survival. It’s about running on empty so long that I no longer remember where I was running. It’s about making do with nothing until there is nothing left I can do. It’s about pain that hasn’t been salved, and injury that hasn’t been treated. It’s about extended deprivation and repeated assaults, enacted again and again, using the same clumsy manoeuvres. It’s about being victimised by assumptions about my apparent success, while my real failure is delivered in daily doses of economic strangulation. It’s about the kind of despair that engulfs, not after weeks of hopeless futility, but months and years of it. It’s about the lies that people have told me before they went on to enact the very opposite of what they said they would. It’s about the cumulative physical damage to me of being unable to access medical and dental care. It’s about losing my inheritance and all the personal mementos that I vowed I would fight for, before I’ve even had the chance to fight. It’s about the falsehoods writ large that have kept me personally isolated from the people I most care about. 

No, it’s not about you at all, unless you are one of those people I care about. But it is about you if you find dismay or distress or anger of your own in what I’ve written. It’s about you if your pain meets mine in the twists and turns of this horrible extended torment that has taken so many excruciating words for its voice. And it is very definitely about you if any or all of this thrusts a jagged blade through the tattered remains of what care or regard ever existed between us. I’m not sure you understand the depth of desperation that could require such an enormous risk. But neither can I comprehend how any of this could be a shock to you. How is it that the truth of my life has been so invisible when I am so painfully in the view of so many people all the time? How can you, any of you, have allowed this to go on so long, even after all of my best and most eloquent words had collapsed into a torrent of incoherent distress? 

No, I’m not sure you understand. But I hope you will try. 

thirty

This thirty rings hollow, like the crashing of these waves onto an empty beach. This thirty is mine yes but stripped away from me also, taken along with all the other absences and all the other losses. This thirty is wrapped, muffled in your convenient assumptions, and your careless permission for unforgiveable things to be rendered unto me, again. Again and again this thirty is turned upon itself, unrecognisable in the disgorgement of what should-have-been, false in what was, and yet it was this way and it is. This thirty is mine yes but taken from me also. Did my words cut you? Did they cut you like this misshapen thirty has cut me? Did they stripe upon your skin like this thirty did mine, this thirty and before that others too? This thirty has howled in this listening place, and with many others, and its cries were met with silence, and that too rings hollow on the moaning wind. There is no joy here, only failure. Is the failure mine, or is it merely borne by me? I am torn down by this, again, and no new number of promises will make this better. This thirty was mine but now it is become wrong, like so many other wrongs, and I have forgotten so much and in my forgetting it has been turned to lies. And with those lies only sorrow and all the harrowing hours are wrapped around it and all of my hopeless helpless anguish and I cannot and I cannot do this and I cannot bear this and I cannot I just cannot live this thirty and all the others I cannot. 

insufficient

your tidy lawn / is

a poor receptacle

for these waves of despair

you

You

yes, you

have made a

travesty 

of my life. 

30 years

and this 

this

is what I 

get? 

I am 

done.

I am done with

pretending

that the insufficient

is enough

that the unacceptable

is happenstance

that these misfortunes

are but a near miss

I

deserve

better

Fuck you.

Fuck all of you.

You who are getting away with it

and you who have failed me

and you who didn’t even fucking turn up

You 

have made a 

travesty 

of my life

In low fields by the sea

Like barley bending

In low fields by the sea,

Singing in hard wind

Ceaselessly;

Like barley bending

And rising again,

So would I, unbroken,

Rise from pain;

So would I softly,

Day long, night long,

Change my sorrow

Into song.  

~ Sara Teasdale