Spoken word: love letter to me then and me now.

Last night

I dreamed about the man who once haunted my nightmares.

He drove me out of every home that once bore my name including

my name

my house

job

phone number

best friend

city

life.

4 years have passed.

3 since I last saw him.

2 since I last hid from him.

1 since I last heard from him.

6 months since I last feared him.

In my dream he was in court, but I wasn’t the victim

In my dream he was fighting a fight that was not mine and I

felt bad for him but I knew that I could not help,

In my dream he was desperate and I was calm,

In my dream he was trapped but I was free to leave, in my dream

I was free.

I didn’t care if he won or lost.

In my dream I won, because winning

is having your life.

In my dream I left the court and in the next room. was his ex wife

The woman he left for the girl that I was, me

the bullet shot through this woman’s heart, me

a willing weapon, a practiced prop,

a girl grown from a child who learned submission like a first word / and if they speak to you in your native tongue you dont think twice about answering.

And anyway

why would you when it’s something you’re so good at?

I slip on shackles and you’d swear they were jewelry. Even now.

Writing this so it sounds like a ballad when what it was

was a practice in how to die still breathing.

It’s always forgiving yourself that comes the hardest.

Not for loving him

but for abandoning you.

You met him and saw every curse ever cast in your name, didn’t you,

The prophesies you’d traveled miles to outrun,

written novels to overwrite but you always knew your days were stolen,

yes

You always knew you had it coming.

didn’t you.

In the end he was a broken mirror.

He could stay gone a thousand years

but he couldn’t take with him what you saw about yourself.

In my dream. I walked in and she was there. She was well. We sat across from each other and talks ed. Like equals. Like teammates. Like veterans returned home from the same war. “What a sad life he lives,” she said to me in my dream. “How small to be him. But you know. He did it to himself.”

I woke up and went to live a life that is mine. I only remembered the dream later that day.

The Buddhists say compassion is like a circle

til it includes the self it’ll only ever be an arc.

It’s been 4 years.

I am dreaming. and I am living my way around

to meeting myself back on the other side.

-September 2019