All The Answers I Didn’t Have When You Asked Me To Tell You Something I’d Never Told Anyone

1. As a child, I sometimes hid in racks between clothes in stores. I don’t remember where we were, but once I made my way to a roof. My dad was so sure I’d jump. I became a leash child. I usually blame my inability to let go on my being Scorpio. But maybe I inherited it from my mother.

2. There’s never been so much distance between us. I’m none of the things she wanted me to be. Sometimes I think who I am scares her. She says she doesn’t know me at all. I don’t tell her she isn’t special in the sense that I don’t think anyone really does.

3. If you study my face carefully, you’ll be able to tell my lips are asymmetrical. This used to bother me, but now, in fact, it’s one of the things I love the most about me. It’s one thing in common I have with my mother.

4. I think the only other aspects of my physique I like are my legs and how deep my spine curves in. I don’t like anything else. I hate my stomach. My hips. My breasts. I’m still working on body positivity. Some days I can look in the mirror and like what I see. Other days, even getting dressed is a bitch.

5. Sometimes I don’t know if maybe my struggles have to do less with liking what I see and more with where this body has been.

6. I lie about how I lost my virginity. The truth is something I don’t want to share with anyone. Some things are better left buried.

7. I keep a lot to myself. Some profound, some insignificant.

8. I sometimes wish I wouldn’t have gotten Lasik. I don’t miss the chronic dry eye, or the cleaning of contact lenses, but I do miss changing up my look and wearing glasses. It’s more than that, though. I used to think it would be refreshing to open my eyes, wake up, and be able to see the world so clearly. Now, there are mornings I miss the haziness, the blurriness, those couple of minutes where I couldn’t exactly make out everything around me. There are times I wish I was blind to things.

9. Since the first time I said it at 15, I’ve said I love you to 5 different people. There were times I knew it was a lie. There were times I believed it. I can only think of one person I didn’t say it to fill a void. One who I’ve loved different. One I’m afraid I’ll always love.

10. (It was you. It’s you. It’s always been you.)

11. I’m afraid all the poetry has been blasphemous, sometimes I wonder if all there was between us was an attraction. An addiction.

12. There’s only been one person who has said I love you to me and meant it. He didn’t know at all who I was.

13. My first love left literal bruises on me. I think since then I don’t know how to associate love without any kind of hurt.

14. I don’t want to say I love you ever again, unless it’s to the one.

15. I’m afraid I’m too jaded to actually ever feel it. I don’t know if I have it in me anymore. I could write volumes about the shit I’ve been through. I meet people and can only feel disinterest. I don’t know if it’s the people I meet or the fact that I may sometimes feel detached.

16. I often wonder where I go when I go. I catch myself sometimes. Coming to. Like I was just somewhere outside myself. Is this what dissociation is like? Is this what death is like?

17. I don’t believe in heaven or hell but sometimes I wish such a concept was real. I read about this woman in California who beat a 92-year-old Mexican man visiting his family in the states with a brick, all the while yelling things like “go back home.”  It’s people like this that make me wish there really was a place they’d end up in where they’d face all the pain I couldn’t inflict upon them myself.

18. I often wonder if the amount of hate in my heart for people like that makes me just like them.

19. My mom always told me that what she wanted the most for me was love, even if I couldn’t have anything else. She recently told me that no matter what is ever happening between us, she still prays I find that kind of love every night. I don’t believe in god, but something about what she said made me wish some omniscient power out there could really hear her.

20. I wish people still wrote letters the way some people pray. There’s something so intimate about capturing sentiment on a page. Something so ephemeral made so permanent. Something about being able to hold and read the words someone intended for you over and over again. There’s this secret between my grandma and me, it involves letters her and my grandpa used to write to each other when she was a teenager, and how she’d hide them in a hole in her mattress. She had never told anyone about that before. She had never let anyone read them, either. Nothing lasts forever. But something like that certainly does. I’ve written letters to people. Some I’ve sent. Some I haven’t. I wonder if I’ve ever made anyone want to write me a letter.

21. The things I write scare me.

22. I want someone to want to know me. After all, isn’t that what this one is all about? I want someone to want to hammer away the hardened layers from my heart. To see that underneath it all, all I am is soft. I want someone to roam in my heart’s wilderness. To see what’s there, and even if it scares them, not take away from the fact they want to stay.

23. I am getting closer to that point where I no longer wish that somebody would have been you.