letters to my mother
9:46 p.m. on 2009-09-07
like being the daughter of a poet, your life not your own, just scrawls on the walls of a house not built to hold you so much as your mother's self-contained misery. we are brought up as appendages, reproductions of the original meant to be passed around and admired but loosely, with poorly-feigned interest from women used to looking at their own only. like new jewelry bought to impress but never worn, when you realize you have nothing to wear it with. you teach us to grow, water minds like the roots of foreign plants not accustomed to this climate and lose interest when our colours change, when we grow away, when you realize we look nothing like the picture in the catalogue. this isn't what i signed up for, you say. i never knew you'd grow away, that you'd grow wild and unpruneable. you say, i never knew how to understand the wretchedness you hid so unlike my own. you tangled, you say. too many knots to tear away secrets to decipher chains with locks you were too young to have. so you brought me here, to fertile soil and left to let me grow.
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