It's often asked why children of addicts
Fade like flesh colored shadows so early in life;
Why they would tear out their own vocal chords to make you listen;
Why anthills become mountains in the narrow tunnel of their fractured perspective;
And each time, every question,
Each ‘no offense’ and furrowed brow that puts my patience through a wood chipper,
Every sympathetic smile, I want to ask them about their school plays
Or their birthday parties,
Their back-to-school nights,
Their Christmases and Halloweens and Fourth of July’s,
The first test they can remember getting an A on,
The first thing they can remember taking pride in.
I want them to rip the joy from their parent’s eyes
And replace it with the lazy countenance that swims in leisure pools of Jack Daniels.
Find your Father’s Day card used as a coaster for their warm glass of vodka
And tell me why I want to be appreciated,
Why I could perform across stages of humiliation and 'not enough'
Until my heart gives out.
Because in every single story book, in every TV movie ever made,
We, as children, have the rosy colored misconception
That we’re the center of our parent’s universes
Rammed down our throats until we ourselves believe it.
But when your father is passed out on their bathroom floor,
The icing of your birthday cake still crusted on their fingertips,
You begin to realize that apart from all the propaganda,
For the rest of your life,
You will be second to a handle of cheap gin.
And that’s when you start to recognize that the flush to your father’s face isn’t fever,
The tremor of their hands, when they hug you as though you’re made of glass,
It’s not from coffee.
Their skin will never smell like home again,
Unless these walls too are soaked in booze and cigarettes.
I want your first heartbreak not to be at the hands of a boy,
Who holds the world in his palms and makes your insides warm,
But by a man who couldn’t believe in himself,
In you,
In the future, enough to keep the edge of a bottle from his lips.
I want you to measure your life in the rigid clockwork of remission and relapse,
And I want you to understand how insignificant you are in someone else’s battles,
How little your love is worth in a war waged by short-lived highs
And inescapable lows.
But that too is a lie-
I don’t want that for anyone.
I never even wanted that for him.
When people ask why children of addicts level cities to be seen,
I want to tell them: that’s all they’ve ever known.
Because we’ve been taught to build walls,
Stones of nights edged in fears and days sliced clean through with anger,
Pieced together by that indefatigable hopes that
Perhaps, maybe, one day,
Your love could rebuild what they’ve once destroyed
With their shaking fingers and blank eyes;
Reassemble the world that fell at their feet
As soon as they gave way to the hurricane.
And these walls cage us in, until there’s nothing left but space
Space to find meaning
To see the beauty that we were never shown
To learn what it means to be loved outside of a broken smile and a half-formed apology.
We’ve been taught to build walls to keep the demons out.
It only makes sense that we would topple them all.