The live's I've lived

Poem #175

Conversations with a random girl in a bathroom
We both stare in the mirror looking tired while washing our hands trying not to make eye contact and one of us makes a joke about the creepy guy sitting at the bar. I'm not exactly sure what it was. She tells me about her father about how she never met him about how she spent most of her life looking for him in other men. And I tell her how I will spend the rest of my life begging to be loved by mine that sometimes maybe not having one is better than having one. We talk about our mothers the way we are mirrors of them but we don't want to be. The way we let people walk all over us the way we hate our reflection because our mom hated her reflection and everyone said we look just like our moms. We talk about the time we both left abusive relationships about how that still haunts us now how every time someone yells behind us we still flinch no matter what. We talk about rape we recall the time we cried for a man to get off of us we talk about the way men hold power over us but we don't like it that way. We talk about the time our best friends betrayed us the way it hurt more than any boy could ever hurt us. We talk about boys hurting us the heartbreak the way we still hold every letter they wrote us under our bed. The way we still hold their sweaters in a garbage bag not ready to let go. We recall our first loves the way we did anything for him the hold he had on us. We talk about the way it felt when he left we talked about how long it took to get out of bed. How it was the first time we ever cried so hard we threw up. Finally, we worn each other about the men in the bar telling each other which ones we got bad feelings from. We give each other the names of our rapist because in the end we are just women trying to protect each other we hug and tell each other not to take shit from a man because in the end we're just girls looking for our father's love.