The Betrayal of Family

The words “I love you” start to mean nothing, or worse, feel like poisonous darts shot from the faces of those meant to hold you in your pain, instead being the source. Loneliness, Christmases spent at a single table at the one open cafe, Thanksgivings spent eating a turkey sandwich realizing you have no one in the world to call your own.

The tears and the smiles build up into piles with no where to go, stuffed into notebooks and cabinets, unhonored memories without human acknowledgement. Songs and poems that touch your soul and yours alone, wanting to share your deepest feelings and not even being able to share the weather.

Strangers come and strangers go, happily smiling and holding hands while you sit in a corner pretending you’re ok, you’re strong, while cracks split your heart into pieces that no one can sew back together….not that anyone cares enough about you to try.

Tears fall into endless black cups of coffee, the waitress asks if you are ok. “You’re fine,” you always say, but you doubt you ever will be. Notebooks and pens are your best friends, books never lie or betray, the stars hold your wishes that you know will never come true.

Little kids giggle and the pain of your empty womb brings you back to reality. An endless sea of endless days, sharing your secrets with voices in your head. Your constant companions on dark nights when the world has gone to bed and you’re left with nothing but a sick yellow light and an empty bed that never takes away the chill that sinks into your bones. The bones that ache from a lifetime of broken promises, of touches that make you sick, of words that cut deep all these years later from people who are still alive, but have forgotten you. People who share your DNA, but who care no more about you than the ant they crushed under their shoe walking to get their morning coffee. Who’d spend their last dollar to watch you suffer, but who wouldn’t give you a single nickle to feed you if you were hungry.

The words mom, dad, brother, sister have become bitter curses spoken so freely on the lips of others, but cause you indescribable pain, like needles shoved into a voodoo doll. Aim for the heart.

A childhood that felt so empty worrying about food and rape while other kids wondered about toys and birthday parties. Asking yourself how you were going to survive and then wondering if it even mattered. Knowing that at any moment you could disappear, cease to exist, and nobody would notice. A blip in a newspaper somewhere if you were lucky. The world moves on without you, your story never told, a lifetime of joys and heart aches left unshared, rotting with your corpse somewhere.

A forgotten cemetery, a headstone that says here lies the unknown, the unloved, whose family threw them away like a piece of trash. Nobody will remember you, who will go to your funeral? The undertaker and a silent black crow, the only being that mourns your death. Who cares anyway? What did this world give you? When were you seen and heard? Let your toxic feelings held in your soul seep out of your corpse to poison the earth that betrayed you, told you every day that you didn’t belong, that you were unwanted.

Your ghost haunts that place, condemned to a life of watching the living love and be loved, wondering how you managed an entire earthly existence without experiencing that. You shout at the people milling around to look at you, but spend an eternity being invisible, nothing new to you. Even in the flesh you were invisible. That girl who never spoke, never cried, knowing by heart every place to hide. Now you hide in plain sight, a skill perfected by your death.

You see your family now, hovering over them, and you realize that your death mattered none to them, as if it was the morning stock report. Or maybe they smiled, they always told you how useless you were, how your very existence was a waste of space. Your last gift to them, the people who are bound by earthly contracts to care, but left you in the street to die alone. You no longer take up space on their planet, a planet you were told was too good for you, too good to even hold your dead body in that lonely cemetery. A place that will someday crumble, your headstone disappearing. A fitting end to a person who spent their life not existing anyway. Who disappeared at will, who perfected the cloak of invisibility, who became an expert listener and watcher so she could remain hidden.

Protected now in death, she roams the world finally free, free to talk to herself, the only person that ever listened to her anyway.