Back to 5.05

My mother's daughter

Feels like we had matching wounds
But mine's still black and bruised
And yours is perfectly fine now
Feels like we buried alive
Something that never died
So, God, it hurt when I found out
(Conan Gray, The Exit, 2022)

---------

It's that I don't know how to talk to you.

How am I supposed to talk to someone who hurt me so deeply that I still flinch whenever they pass behind me or move too quickly toward me?

I want to talk to you so badly;
so badly I wanna hug you and cry in your arms and hear your voice telling me that it's gonna be okay, that I'm not alone, that you love me "even if...";
so badly I wanna throw out years of pain and loneliness and fear.

But how am I supposed to do that, when the only time I tried to talk about it with you, you told me I was spending too much time on the phone?

How am I supposed to do that, when the fear and anxiety of being disappointed and let down once again are stronger than the need for my mom's arms around me and her voice soothing away the bad and the evil?

I want my mom back, I want back when you looked at me and I felt your love for me, I want my girlhood, my childhood, back.

I want the boogeyman to go away, because a mom's love is stronger and more powerful than anything else in the world.

But how?

How, if you look at me and I look at you and the only thing I see and feel is sadness and pain?

How, if your love scares me away?

How?

I'm your daughter, and a woman.

As a woman I understand what you've been through is a part of who you are, and the only way to fight pain for you is to face it.

But as a daughter I'm just so hurt and broke.

Because at some point the trust I had in the woman who raised me alone,
the trust I had in the fact that I'd never feel rejected by half my DNA was shattered.

And now it's so damn hard to open up.
To talk to you without the paralyzing fear that you won't understand, that instead of just hugging me you'll try to fix things when I only want comfort.

And I feel like there are a tiny thousand things we didn't talk about, and all these things get buried alive and we just move on and it's just so tiring and exhausting.