It was the end. But we did not know it then. You do not know the end has happened until later. Or you do not admit it. Looking back, you can see it. And you realise that all the time after that was just an effort to keep going as if it weren’t already over.
I looked at my mother because I was a version of my mother. I looked away from my mother because I was a version of my mother. I was me, but I was also her—my mother, and I understood this all too well.
No one asks me why I hate, no one uses that word, they call me grumpy, not even angry, but grumpy, six letters, something inconsequential and self-inflicted, something powerless, insignificant, something small in a small person, not something that's about society, or about them, just something that means i'm ruining things for myself, something that's in the way of my potential as an object.
I’m at the back, alone, hating, motionless, muted, squeezed into a corner between action and meaning.
Tell me, in your darkness, in your ocean, am I ever there?
Have we ever reached each other?
Have we ever reached each other?