You walked past me again. I remember your pensive face like I was the one at fault. If only it had been so, theoretically you could be absolved of previous crimes.
I think it's the implicit words behind the whole thing.
Maybe that's why I resided to losing myself, instead of losing who I was.
The memories were easier to process than the present. I sat against the wall, cracks surrounding my broken features and mingling with the dried tears staining my cheeks. Red paint dried, smeared in a distracted haze through my hair, imprints lining the cracks that had increased in size. Little red flurries danced in the air, dragging with each of my ragged breaths.
"I still care about you, Lonnie."
Do you recognize the lies you tell? I don't think you do.
It was never a question, but it became one. Where I once longed for you to be by my side, now all I longed for was to make you understand.
Sometimes I think it is for the best though.
If you understood as I did, as everyone around us did, then this would not have happened in the first place. It's a cruel but true consequence of trust.
"I knew I never would be. But more importantly, I didn't want to be."
The inner battle I was constantly facing was one I hated to stare at. The reflection of it in the mirror was cold, harsh, dissonant. I despised what it stood for, what anything stood for anymore. It was the pain of looking that made me wake up. That made me see past the horrors I witnessed in my own reflection.
"The real violence, the violence that I realized was unforgivable, is the violence that we do to ourselves when we're too afraid to be who we really are."
The mirror shattered. Broken into a thousand pieces, it sat around me as though at arms. In all honesty, I was at arms with them, with myself. It was as though I was impersonating someone else, someone who was nothing and everything all the same. If it's all the same, then how could it be so different? How could my words be so humiliating? Maybe humiliation was not the key ingredient, but it was reflected in the broken mirror every time you avoided my consciousness.
The occasional laugh that is far too loud, a circle of trust so false to uphold the image.
I wanted to be who was in that mirror.
It took me so long and will continue to take a vast amount of time. But one thing is for certain, one that I can never look away from.
This was only the beginning.
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Colors Behind the Glass ✓
Poetry[COMPLETED] Lonnie has been through several life-changing events. The most impactful is the death of their abuelita and the loss of someone close to them as they came out as non-binary. They have struggled with coming to terms with these two facts...
