my father’s daughter

If my father could have stayed, 

I imagine he would have held his pain with a beer in his palms and his body in a reclining chair. 

Says he slept on the couch and tweaked his neck so that’s why he can’t put up Christmas lights this year. 

I imagine my father would have easily settled into a routine of buried emotions and television light. 

My mother would sit me on the counter while she talked to her sister on the phone. 

Telling me to mind my fingers as I grazed through the dinner she had on the stove. 

Turning her blue eyes to the pattering feet of my brothers zooming by. 

Her soft hands acting as hammers as she grasped their shoulders telling them to slow down. 

I am the daughter of both of them. 

When you left, I sat on the floor of my bedroom. 

Knees to chest, with rattled breath. 

I was trying to hold myself together. 

Some part of me wanted to curl into myself until maybe I imploded. 

I think I liked the idea of my ending not leaving such a mess. 

Just a small hole for friends and family to bring food too when they felt like talking with the astral anomaly that was their child. 

And the other part of me 

Wanted to run to your house without my shoes on, 

With my hair down and eyes blurry. 

Shivering from the night, half naked 

And accepting rides from strangers. 

Part of me wanted to cut through the fields on the side of the freeway. 

Hoping that there would be shortcuts to ease my black and bloodied feet. 

I would keep running till my lungs collapsed and I would forever be a folktale. 

I would leave a trail of crimson on the wheat for the locals to find and maybe I’d become a mystery they would tell around campfires. 

Some part of me wanted to inch my way into your existence and kiss you 

and kiss you 

and kiss you. 

But again, I am my mother and father’s daughter. 

I stayed tucked on my bedroom floor. 

Took my heart in my hands and punctured the sides with my nails and said, “if we are going to heal, it’s going to hurt.” 

I set my hands like my mother and my body like my father. 

I laid there and I cried until the pain was all over. 

Yet, I have not moved from the floor. 

And time has made me forget what I was trying to do.