You Filed Me Away

I remember your face playing out alien emotions, unable to authentically see my aching heart. How I once adored you, but the bleeding throbs that ricocheted from your rejection ruptured a long time ago. Now there's just a silent stoic simmering rage, repressed into shoots that rotted my roots, embedded into the edge of the threads of my life.

But I don’t miss you.

Prying at the open images of your smiling family, a bitterness stabs envious beats that spin and crash around my mind. Memories flash of her smirks when I was just a young child. Her contempt — she’d won!, sang out, all too loud. I feel my pain turn into hate as it stings my veins, and the guilt washes over me as I struggle to forgive her.

And I struggle to forgive you.

That day, I learned you had given away your daughter, it was her special day; there you were, all sitting together, a happy family. The dull heaviness that held onto the weeping rain of my inner tears and an aching, ancient pain. It was my special day too, a milestone birthday. But the only time you gave me away was when you cast me aside to file me into oblivion.

But it doesn’t matter; I’m too terrified of marriage anyway.

They have all of you, and you play with her baby; they call you grandpapa or nonno. And you look happy, or at least playing the role. You only saw my baby once, or was it twice? And you gave us nothing, nothing but a violent void and a broken legacy.

And so much self-doubt and shame.

Envy whips and slashes across my soul. Jealousy seeps into my sorrowful spirit, bleeding into my comparing and how I reject myself before anyone else can. A lifetime of hurt has mutated into acid, corroding and clotting my trust, leaving a long trail of destruction bespattered behind me.

But it feels good to say it out loud and dampen my envy’s stride. I’m healing my wounds and giving you up, and filing you into oblivion.

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