I hate how you watch me live my life; watch me as I throw away all the childhood dreams I used to hold so close to me, as I struggle to breath in your presence and rush to the kitchen to put food on your plate, to warm you, to have everything ready for the time you come home. But you laugh in my disgrace, and sit there with an accusing finger to point in my pitiful direction, and you wait for my tears to crash into the sodden earth.

But your tears overlap mine, and they are all we can hear echoing the empty walls,

where his filthy hands groped parts of me that have never been so exposed.

And you tell me I don’t know what it feels like to want to die from the unbearable weight of the world. You tell me I know nothing like it; this feeling of sorrow and bitter agony, as you struggle to climb the hills leading to her heaven, but your footsteps get lost in the dirt. You tell me I am just like her; and nothing like you.

And you are right, I am nothing like you. But I have never been anything like her.

I watch him watching me from the corner of his eye. He is calm, he has no worry lines growing across his forehead. He doesn’t tremble in the absence of her love. He does not second guess the Lord you pray to, because you are still holding his hand.

I watch you point the finger at the wrong person, and I wait eagerly for the moment when death shall arrive at his door, and the truth can be leaked out into the world.

But I wait, in a barren place where your love shall never cloth me,

because I am on my own

but at least I know this road will lead to something else,

and for that I shall never turn away