I imagined your love story into epic existence, built
you into a forbidden love in which my life was
byproduct. But then the world caught up with me
and a man knocked air from my lungs. I stopped
hero-worshipping a father. And you became victim,
a vessel for broken things – my left heart, skin
crescents under fingernails, starved teeth at my
neck, and the bus shuddering home the morning
after. How salt brittled my lashes when I found
myself alone in the dark and tar anchored itself at
the pit of my stomach and it still. Won’t go. Away.
The aftermath is defined as walk of shame. It means
you regret the night before as you depart from your
mistakes. But how do you depart from a gut-punch
you never asked for? You and I are bound to these
byproducts of repeated history – where our whole-
ness splits under frigid hands and swallows our
existence into silence, how we’re drowned with our
legs up, heads forced underwater
unable to swim.
I never knew mouth-to-mouth could suffocate. And
how, Other Mother, can I bare my truths to a room
full of strangers when I can’t bear to tell my mom
why I hate being touched anymore?
It’s said that trauma is a funny thing because of how
we handle it and I suppose there is honesty in that –
I laughed the next day in the face of my hurt,
echoing the empty. Tried to bury it in sand, let it
sink. But nothing can be hidden from the ocean, and
every time I close my eyes water erodes my cover
until I can’t forget greedy fingers seeking my mouth
as if to steal my tongue away.
They tell us to forget all the time. They sink our
truths in case we don’t. We can hardly remember
the hunger of starvation or how foreign hands
conquered the maps of our bodies. In therapy, I
learned repression only stifles our healing. I know
how deeply you wish to forget. How you made me
cross oceans of diminishment just to erase your pain
but I ask you now: stop running, floundering,
drowning. Beg you to remember. Him. Me. Him.
You. Us. Me.
Us.
Oraenmanieyo means it’s been a while since I’ve
seen you last. Let’s meet once more at the center of
this ocean, firm-footed in sand that dares not
swallow us whole, so that you and I may learn to
breathe again.