Brutal

The road was white beneath us,

the world had turned to glass,

and then the sky became the floor

and nothing stayed where it was.

Metal screamed against the winter,

the windows became the ground,

my mother was calling out our names,

and everything we owned

was scattered somewhere around.

And I remember screaming,

not because I knew what to do,

but because somebody had to say it,

so I said it for all of you:

we are going to be okay.

As if saying it loudly enough

could make it become true.

As if a child could bargain with God

by promising survival

for everyone else too.

I did not know then

that some people hear a child crying

and call it noise.

Some people see terror

and become crueler.

Some people tell you

to shut your mouth

while the world is upside down.

So I learned early

that screaming doesn’t mean

someone will come.

Sometimes the only answer

is thirty minutes of sirens

and strangers cutting you

out of the life you knew.

Then came the rooms.

Hotel after hotel,

a year without a home,

without the little things

that prove you belong somewhere.

Our lives had been packed

into objects we could no longer keep,

and I learned that poverty

is sometimes just grief

with nowhere to sleep.

I had already lost my sister

to a distance I couldn’t cross,

already missed my father

like a person mourning someone

who was still alive.

Then there was a man

who stood my siblings in a line

and told them they were his children.

He looked at me

and gave me a different name:

never.

Never call me Dad.

Never belong here.

Never mistake the blood

in your veins

for permission to be loved.

I was a child.

I did not understand

why love had conditions

or why mine seemed

to expire at the door.

I only knew

that when I cried

my mother sometimes drove me

far enough into an empty field

that the horizon became a wall,

and left me there

until the crying stopped.

So I became good

at swallowing oceans.

Good at making grief

small enough to fit inside me.

Good at looking fine

while something inside me

was learning how to disappear.

And then we went home.

Except home was not home.

There were walls

but no refuge in them.

There was food

but it was not always mine.

There were rules

that became weapons

and hunger became punishment.

My grandmother knew.

Maybe that is what I remember most.

Not everything she said.

Not her whole face.

Not enough years

to know the woman she was.

Just her hands.

The secret passing of food.

The quiet little rebellion

of making sure I ate.

She looked at a hungry child

and did not ask

what she had done to deserve it.

She simply thought,

this is wrong.

And for a little while

food tasted different.

It tasted like somebody

believed I deserved

to remain alive.

But kindness had to hide.

We were caught.

And then she was taken from me too.

No more secret meals.

No more little pieces of mercy

slipped between hands.

Just another door closing.

And before I could learn her properly,

death came and finished

what separation had started.

I still grieve someone

I barely got to know.

Isn’t that a strange kind of mourning?

To miss a person

and miss the memories

you never got the chance to make.

To mourn not only who they were,

but who they might have become

to you.

Then came the bunk bed.

The screaming.

The sudden violence

of a head meeting metal.

The taste of blood.

A mouth split open

because obedience

was apparently worth more

than a child’s body.

And two days later

I ran.

Rain made the hill slick.

My feet disappeared beneath me.

The earth took me down

in pieces,

and when my arm broke

I remember thinking

that surely this hurt enough

to finally count.

But when I came home,

I was told

the pain was my fault.

That the bone had broken

because I had defied him.

As though the body

could be sentenced

for the sins of a child.

As though suffering

was something I had earned.

And somewhere inside all of that,

the little girl

in the overturned RV

was still screaming:

we are going to be okay.

She kept saying it

through the hotels.

Through the hunger.

Through the fields.

Through the empty spaces

where her sister should have been.

Through the distance

between herself and her father.

Through the hands

that hurt her.

Through the grandmother

who tried to feed her

and disappeared too soon.

She kept saying it

even when her arm was broken.

Even when her mouth was bleeding.

Even when nobody believed

a child should have to survive

any of it.

And I think I finally understand her.

She wasn’t promising

that nothing terrible would happen.

She was promising

that we would still be here

when it was over.

So listen to me now,

little thing.

You were right.

Not about the world.

The world was cruel.

You were right about us.

We are here.

We have become

all the things

they never imagined.

We have a body

that belongs to us.

A voice

that does not need permission.

Hands that can feed themselves.

A life that does not have

to be earned through obedience.

And somewhere beneath

every scar and memory,

your grandmother’s hands

are still there,

quietly placing bread

into yours,

telling you without words

what nobody else would:

eat.

You are allowed to live.

So I will.

For the girl

who screamed inside the wreckage.

For the child

who thought love had to be earned.

For the little body

that was starved

and struck

and blamed for breaking.

For the grandmother

who knew better

and never got enough time

to tell me so.

I will live loudly enough

that none of them disappear.

And when the memories come back

like headlights through the dark,

when the past rolls over me

and tries to make me small,

I can hear that little voice again.

Not frightened now.

Not begging.

Certain.

And I know it’s her this time; 

You are going to be okay.

And this time,

I believe it.