every poem is a memory #1

break it, u bought it

there are still those evenings where i drift listlessly into the kitchen, haunted by my own displaced muscle memory. i place my dish in the sink as i sink onto the floor. my knees graze the cabinet door as they buckle below me. another splinter. there’s a knot where my rib cage begins. i try to inhale, but it snags, gets caught up in my own anatomy again, and

my eyes are shouting tears, they scream out in burning streams. i am in the kitchen but i am nowhere to be found. i’m in every kitchen i’ve stood in. i’m in my favorite kitchen where the sun kissed my shoulders through the eggshell blue trimmed windows. i’m in the kitchen where i cooked for two, and ate for none. i’m in a kitchen and i can’t remember if it is mine, or if could it ever be. 

i could break the dishes and i want to, but i can never discard of any inanimate object i’ve assigned love to. i could break the dishes but i don’t. 

i allow myself to exhale. sometimes i become a banshee. sometimes i choke it back and shake my head and firmly say out loud to the empty room “no, you have to walk out of the kitchen. you cannot go back there.” most times, i sit collapsed on the floor with my small body holding onto itself for dear life. 

wailing, dry heaving. 

flailing, eventual healing. 

i gather myself, soppy-eyed and excused to my own room. no one sees this but i feel the shame of a hundred gazes. the shame to still drift into one kitchen, to remember that there were others, and to feel that space through other spaces yet somehow, all at one moment.

disoriented by memory, i rest my head. eyes swollen. the tired beat of that drum in my tired chest cavity. i did what i thought i was supposed to do. i carved myself into my own home.