Flower Fortune- Sweetbriar: Poetry and fragrance.

All I ever wanted was to be that someone that was special to another, to be that someone who could perhaps change the world for the better, to be someone who was not sick in mind or in heart, whose doubts came to nothing and amounted to wasted time. But my doubts are eating me up in my sickness, and my heart is such a dark navy, it hinges on black. My children have not touched me in days, my husband cautiously lifts me into his arms and rocks me to sleep. Books slide unread from my fingers, old memories haunt my dreams, and I think back to that dreadful day Harry shielded me from my mother's blows. I wake up, sweating and crying, thinking that my old enemy has come back to haunt and hurt and make me powerless. I cannot speak regularly. When I open my mouth, my throat clogs, my eyes are wild, I don't know what I really wanted to say in the first place. Harry holds my hand and asks me questions, begs me to go to the hospital, but I cannot raise myself up.

I've written six poems since my sickness. I have a way of doing it, of propping the computer up with pillows so that only my eyes and fingers need to move. They are all despairing and dark and complex. They address things no one would want to hear, such fiery, depressing things, secrets not even my husband knows. I am drowning in them, these horrible memories that bubble up in my despair.

How melodramatic I seem, how unreasonable and horrible I feel even pretending that I have things to hide. When they are nothings, gray specks of sand on a completely white canvas. But they darken now.

Like the day I was almost raped, but was hit instead, exploding sunbursts in my brain and a sharp pain behind my left ear even though my nose was hit. How I thought,. I will be on the street, dying. How I was just a girl and the boy trying to rape me was just a boy from school, a regular boy with no previous aggressions. How Harry saw the boy bring his fist back for another swing, and pushed him into a brick wall, and broke two of his ribs. How Harry used the same violent hands to gently carry me to his car. How my mother took me out of the hospital the same day because we couldn't pay the bill and Harry's mother rushed me to the emergency room when I fainted at their dinner table. How the boy ended up in the emergency room the next day because Harry put him there and how he ended up there again the next week because Harry and Rev decided once wasn't enough. How the boy stopped coming to school altogether. How I ditched school for three weeks afterwards, and the boy was never punished.

Like the weekend my mother invited her friends over to chase the dragon and I sat there and watched as my books got covered in a foggy, druggy mix. How I stayed at Harry's the whole week and had convulsions from the smoke, and how I lay in bed thinking I would kill my mother and write a bestseller about it. How my mother used my only money (when I was at Harry's) to buy herself more drugs even though I couldn't afford to feed myself. How I would walk in and watch her inject drugs through her arm, her wrist, in between her toes. How her friends would laugh at me and slap me and hug me and sometimes try and sexually assault me. How my mother made me leave for three weeks once so she could have sex in my room. How when I yelled and asked her where I should go she hit me, gave me her last three dollars, and kicked me out.
 I always ran back to Harry and still do.

I love him so much it hurts.
I badly miss my parents-in-law.
I wish everyone around me wasn't so tired from life.

If only they didn't have to watch me when I was such a mess. And still I am loved.
I feel better after writing; always do.