A little piece by a wannabe Todd Anderson, who has too much anxiety and love for poems. I went to a beach a few weeks ago and started writing this from then. My first time writing poetry, you can probably tell. But it was nice to discover an outlet. My biggest realization while writing this was that scritch scratches of pencils are oddly and largely inspiring. The whole work is based on the too-heavy burden of being your parent's vessel of dreams.
TW: Self Harm
Last month we went to the beach,
I saw my parents watching the huge waves,
I watched them like an intruder,
Their eyes spoke things their mouth didn't,
Eyes with wonder & happiness; eyes with pride & dreams.
But I fell in love with the small ones,
Found solace in them,
Entranced, enamored - pretty little things with so much life.
The small waves flow in the same path
As the larger ones, but they fall short.
Never enough in comparison with their peers
But they are there, happy & content, they’re alive.
Mother speaks with her eyes,
Drifting to me from the big waves.
But father speaks, his voice reminiscent of thunderstorms,
He talks about the bigger waves, never the smaller ones.
I used to push my face into my pillow when I was younger,
To feel the helplessness of not being able to breathe,
To gasp for air seconds later,
The exhilaration that came with finding my breath again.
His words come with the same suffocation,
Only now, I don’t find my breath again anymore.
His words make the sea look empty,
To go along the waves and let the tide pull me to itself,
Let the ocean claim me to her heart.
More than that, they make me want to scream.
And I do.
A silent scream louder than the thunder;
It's audible in the way my eyes become the ocean,
A chasm filled with water,
Water to drown my misery and water that reflects my eyes.
It’s silent, it's loud, and it tastes like metal.
I’m a mirror to my mother, I’m a reflection of everything my father is.
At the glance of their glimmering eyes, the water dries up,
And I kill myself every day,
The water turns crimson, flowing through my cheeks.
The small waves I dream of turn bigger,
And I start craving them too,
Almost reaching their expectations but not enough,
Never enough.
Turns me into a shell of who I was once.
Their eyes have never looked brighter.
But there’s water in the blood, too, and you could fool yourself only for so long.
I went to the beach last night alone in my bathroom.
A slight sting, a beat, an ocean on the bathroom floor,
It rattled me.
But it fell quiet for the first time in so long,
The way it used to when I pushed my face into the pillow
There was suffocation but
There was the exhilaration I was craving for.
And I knew I flew too close to the sun,
I’m falling back with my broken, melted wings and
There’s a vast ocean of crimson to welcome me underneath.
It was scary, yes, but oh so comforting,
To have something to look forward to,
To fall back to a morbid safety net.
My parents will go to the beach the next time
And not realize the ocean they fell in love with
Was made by the crimson of their daughter,
That the beauty came at the cost of their daughter every night.
Water takes the shape of the ocean,
My sorrows take the shape of my body.
Ten years later, will I stop seeing red if I make it?
When will I watch the ocean and not want to suffocate myself again?
Does this ever end?
Do I want it to end?
There’s calm in the eye of the storm too.
Mother, I'm scared. Father, I'm terrified.
Tuck me to sleep again,
Pull the pillow from my face like you used to,
Love me like you used to.
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