IN THE SERVICE OF HEAVEN

the wicked cupids pen a memoir | 03

{ a daughter's crooked memoir }

part three || a goddess

The things my parents never taught me

I learned in the middle of nowhere

With the blue mustang cutting across the forgotten roads,

A song on the radio time had forgotten and dust in the midnight air.

It was perhaps the happiest time of my life,

Far from the thorns of my childhood, from their firsts around my throat,

Away from them.

In the suburbs of our country, I found that I was the endless,

Unexplored and unwritten forever, stuffed into a moment

Like so many stars into a single darkened sky.

I was the empty bottles rolling across the highway in a crescent,

I was the sound of the motor as we scaled the walls of the world,

The burning in the back of dry throats,

The scraping against blackened lungs

In that midnight we drove into with my familiar strangers.

My parents failed to tell me that I will choke on that very night

Which seeped into me as moonlight braided itself into my hair

In that aqua-blue mustang. They forgot to mention that the dream of the suburbs

Will end with puke in toilets at a closed gas stop, with white little pills

And crushing, crippling waves of morning sunlight

Falling onto eyes so used to the pale moon's soothing beams.

The night always ends with a reminder of another wasted chapter of living,

Of dreams torn apart by so many reckless, wrong choices,

And of thorns in that garden of childhood innocence

Where roses began to bloom much too late.

My parents never told me that a sunlit deity

Will clog my blackened throat and tighten a noose of stars around it.

I never thought that she would come for me so early, creep up behind me

And dig her coiling nails into the soft flesh of my back.

My mother told me she loved my father,

I never got to hear him speak the same.

Had the deity not blessed them with the same murderous gift?

The goddess, clothed in the colors of my fears, she taught my blood-stained lips

The meaning of true love. She whispered a prayer into my tearing heart

And I felt my withered limbs shift to its heavenly rhythm.

When she let me go, I crawled out of those suburbs, breaking my nails

On the concrete, tearing my knees on the shards of memories,

Swallowing glass as I left behind the forever I discovered inside of me.

When she let me go, there was someone else waiting.

"A shame, really, that all we got was a dying breath

In the space of eternity."

[ suburbs of our country ] - outside of New York, where obscure dreams wither, giving way to the magical, undiscovered corners of imagination

[ sunlit deity ] - a blinding, glorious stream of light that sets your every cell on fire, igniting your entire existence

[ someone else ] - a lover whose every touch is a constellation

END OF { a daughter's crooked memoir }

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