Feet of my father
Late night musings
My mother and I share the same heart, ruptured and swollen, so I thought everything about me was tied to her and made of her especially my throat where my voice catches so often but somehow manages to eek itself out day after day even when the words aren’t there, finding their way to me because my mother, she seems to never be gone from rubbing her strong hands on my back or caressing the places in my soul that have been carved out by my own insecurity and the jagged edges of our lives.
But I am breaking your heart in ways that remind me of my father with his stumbling feet and absent-minded loving forgetting that little ones, loved ones need tenderness and compassion not the jealous lashings of an impassioned man—apathetic lover or the wandering feet of a person who lost his home or her way some time long before you even crossed their path these are the pieces of my body that lay hidden beneath my skin, under all the tattoos I got after he told my body it was too big, too stocky and mutilation was the only way around childhood traumas the ones fitting snugly in between my bones that I thought would shed with the baby fat, but that never left and neither did the lowly way I saw myself, forgotten and flawed in my eyes or my father’s if these, too, are his and only able to see the murky reflection of my self.