Aphorism

Her childhood trauma was not simple as baking a cake, if so she would be the ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, her mother preached. She wanted to prematurely break out of her shell. Fly to a future across a golden-bridge. A haven she imagined as her mom redundantly spoke. We will cross that bridge when we get there. Her mother never noticed her ten year-old daughter’s wings flapping for an escape. She fell into a pool of guilt, drowning in years of fault. Denying the shadowed monster justified her mother seeing the truth. Molesting hands from your brother? If she did believe, Christianity would make her forgive. She hid in her teen years, but managed to emerge through poetry. It was the only thing she had her way with—her words.

I am thirty-three; my shadows were real.