no more shoulds & shouldn'ts

every time someone asks about my husband & children, i’m both flattered & embarrassed. flattered they think someone could love me, promise me eternity despite the reek of desperation flowing from my pores, radiating off of me like a 12-year-old boy doused in axe body spray. embarrassed because no one could want an eternity with me, make a life with me, make a new life with me. & further embarrassment about being flattered when the question actually has nothing to do with thinking i could be worthy of these things but rather that it is just the expected for those who have walked as many years as i have. embarrassment at having failed their test, their standards, the norm. all i’ve ever done is fail to be the person 14-year-old me knew i could be, should be. it’s all the shoulds & shouldn’ts creeping up again, whispering & tapping & giggling behind my back. i thought by now i’d be so much better than i am, something more than nothing at the very least. & it doesn’t matter if they think i’m a failure but it does matter that i think i am. that i have created none of the things i intended. all i’ve done is waste time & money & resources & energy that someone else would have done so much more with. i am undeserving of the life i was born into. i should have been better. i shouldn’t have spent so much money on take out & ubers & acrylics & acupuncture. i should have built a house with my bare hands & scraped dirt out from under my nails before i put my cauldron on to boil. i shouldn’t have spread my legs or my mouth or my jaw. she wouldn’t hate me, but she’d be ashamed if she knew me. but she doesn’t. but i know her so intimately, so how foreign & excavated it is that she will never touch me. never have the ability to feel disgust or pride for me. there’s so many of her but only one of me & i know all of her. she wants to know me, she wanted to be grown up with me & i can breathe into myself & conjure her & sit with her & speak with her but she can’t do the same for me. we can only go backwards, we can’t move forward & yet we can only ever move forward, never backwards. when i was young, my dad had a boat that sat parked in the backyard & i’d crawl into it when spring was infantile & succulent & scrawl away all the opulence. i’d be happier if i were still her. but she doesn’t know that. she thinks she’ll be happier being me. i don’t look forward, only back, but the back had hope & faith in the forward so i could scrape the essence of the 15-year-old that still bleeds into my intestines & screw my new eyeballs in correctly & have faith in what’s to come, in who i can still be. there’s convoluted shapes i could still twist into & pretzels i could still dip in cheese. books i can read, books i can write. a one bedroom apartment i could fill with pink & popcorn & paperbacks & precious precious precious. i could still go back to london, revisit all the places i felt aimless & aimful. i could still write something that matters. could still hold a child’s head to my heart. i could still, i could still, i could still. i can walk hand-in-hand with the god that looks after me especially & fulfill the fortune cookie’s promise. i am not abandoned. i am not abandoned. i can reduce, reuse, recycle the love i’ve been given. make it all purposeful. erase the waste i’ve created, stop it from floating somewhere in the pacific where it tangles around turtles & breaks down into our drinking water. it’s not over til it’s over & it’s never over. there’s no good in giving up & good is better than perfect & no one has ever asked me for perfection but me anyway. & failure isn’t the enemy. never trying, never existing, never being anything at all is. i don’t have to be the war, the chaos, the devil. my conception, my birth are not proof i’m the anti-christ, they are simply coincidence & a jumping off point. maybe not coincidence. maybe it is holy, guidance, anointing. maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s any of the above because this isn’t a multiple choice test. it’s not a test at all. there’s no way to fail the human experience, especially if you open up to the honesty, open up to the adventure, the ride, the gentleness that exists in the violence & the disorder of it all. let yourself be seen, be held, be thrown away again & again & again. reduce the secrets, reuse the patience, recycle the love, over & over & over. it’s not over til it’s over, & it’s never really over. repeat, redundancy, recycling. you can write the same poem again & again & again & it’s okay because each time we find a different level of earth, of emotion, of ecstasy. it’s all just breath work & meditation & working back to the core. umbilical in nature. mammalian evolution. there is no scale, no rubric that matters. there is only truth & essence & kindness for the sake of kindness. understood as to understand. instrumental in the peace brokerage. we’re going to keep going & she may never meet me & i may visit her too often, peering through the frosted windows of time & growth, but we’ll keep going & figure out what it is we’re going to do, shoulds & shouldn’ts finally cast aside. just hope & her strength & what it is to sleep easy.