"she'll tell you she's an orphan, after you meet her family..."

i am holding hard truths
with only my own weak weight to catch the fall

i get up and start over...

grandmother's love did not look like
homebaked treats and nourishment
it was are you hungry are you sure let's go get something to eat
and sometimes it was sit down and expensive
and other times it was gas station pizza

mother's love did not look like
anything that ever existed for me
it was you're not good enough what's wrong with you leave me alone
and sometimes it was pretending to care
and other times it was embarrassment

your love felt the same
another comfortable lie that this was safe
until the wound, in search of light,
could no longer be contained

.  .  .

an incomplete poem about an ever-pressing journey to self.

sometimes i just want to run away and never come back, find neverland, start over, as in books, in a new town. as if people can just slip into new lives...

i do all sorts of things to escape and all sorts of things to stay stuck, but engagement doesn't come easy. mostly all i can say is, "i don't know." but that's probably not true. it's probably easier to feign indecisiveness and certainty than the core of my own truth.

.  .  .

in other news, instead of doing something drastic to my hair, as i often do during times likes this, i'm undoing my dreads. it started out as a mess, friends suggested i just shave them off, how liberating it is to just cut it. i've been there and done that. valency saved the day by offering to give it a go and she managed to take my largest dread out without issue...after a deep conditioning, you can't even tell that all that hair was a tangled mess for the better part of a year.

i'm undoing them slowly and gently (got three small ones out last night) and finding the untangling process to be way more liberating. i'm not cutting loose of the pain and the grief, of the could-have-beens and lost causes, i'm sitting with and shifting through them.

every now and then i hear my mom telling her friend, "oh, she thinks she's dreading her hair." as if i hadn't just shown her the actual dreads already in place, as if i wasn't standing right there.

she also used to tell me i wouldn't like them. years before i went on my short dread journey, even. in honesty, i do like them (but mostly on other people.) dreads are more high maintenance than i ever imagined, pulling them apart was a bunch of no fun, and the lumpy, big dreads really harsh my shavasana and other yoga poses where a flat neck and back are crucial. and so on, with the logic...

i started this little dread journey out of love, as a way back to myself and while there are times when hacking at the roots is absolutely the most legitimate response, i am choosing to honor this current passage with a gentleness and patience that feels brand new. i am getting unstuck, and finally choosing slow and steady over sharp objects.