Sometimes I wish this life wasn’t a life at all

But rather a game, you pick and choose your avatar, your home, and your parents. 

An easier life where it’s okay if something's wrong, when you can click “back,” and erase your previous moves, and restart without so much pressure to be perfect. 

A life where codeswitchers aren’t looked down upon, 

Where you truly can compartmentalize. 

Everyone would love a life like that, parents and kids. 

Teachers, students, family, lovers. 

Everyone lives a happy life with few problems and peace at the end of the day. 

A life where you can lay your head down at night without worry of anything, not your future or others, not money or insecurity, or a heaviness following you even in your dreams.

A heavy clouded storm you can’t seem to get rid of until there's nothing but silence. 

Pure silence. 

That subtle yet almost hurtful sigh as you’ve had the longest week and finally begin to take care of yourself with a warm bath. 

Some days you try to relieve it with these baths and it doesn’t seem to work, and it feels heavier and heavier until you’re crushed under the storm of tears and crumbling stress. 

Begging to pool down, almost bursting from behind your eyes as you open your eyes and realize you’re still there. 

At the dinner table with your family as they scream and yell, at the family disappointment.

 It’s blaring loud but you can’t make out any words, just screams in your head of the pain the little girl in you feels. 

She cries like a banshee every night, wanting to feel loved and held safely at night. 

Her older self tries to make it happen for her to feel safe for once, its all her younger self craves. But family happens. 

Life happens. 

And it seems the screams get louder and louder as the girl gets buried deeper and further the older she gets

Her younger self’s dream she craves pushed closer yet further in the same moment.

It seems all she longs for won’t become a reality and that scares the little girl in me. 

Because that little girls fear is that she remains unsafe and unloved, she screams all night in fear that the one feeling she so desperately craves will die with her and be forgotten.

She cries in fear, she will be forgotten.