Nineteen

30 years and I still can't call myself a woman
My heart is still girl, my heart is still nineteen
Was it your love that cursed me, caged me into naive innocence,
or was it the lack of my own

Who might I have been had you not found me floundering and wingless
Five, six, seven years and what was life without you
Would my stomach still ache had I not spent all that time blindly ingesting your anger and fear
How might I have aged had I adored myself as much as I adored you

So much time spent swooning into your perfections, falling head first into his, strangling myself with hers
How did you, you, you get to be so perfect
Welcome to my seminar, I like to call it,
How to have compassion for everyone but yourself

Sweet militant child, little orphaned idiot
who said nothing but yes, always, and then traded alimony for your 3am vitriol
so now how do I love the pieces of myself I only have because of you
How do I keep the places only you had led me to

11 years and I've let the girl walk our minefield of memories
I've let the girl, just a baby playing house, pick at every hangnail mistake,
peel the skin away, and bleed shame all over herself
I've let the girl rot without your approval
Let me age now
Let me say sorry, let me say I was an asshole, let me say thank you for that perfect day
Let me shrivel with grace and not from someone else's love limits
It's not a girl now but a woman who can finally say that all those times I wrote about you, you, you
I was actually writing about me
Finally, me me me
Me at nineteen