She does it again
rises from the wreckage of yesterday,
plasters herself together with apologies
and forces her limbs to move
in ways that make others believe she is whole.
This is the magic trick of her existence:
she disappears inside herself,
yet still, they see a girl standing there,
smiling,
nodding,
offering
as if she were not already a mausoleum
of her own implicit sorrow.
But what they do not understand
is that she is not alive.
She is an umbra of a girl
they once knew,
a walking requiem,
a puppet with all the strings hidden
so well even she forgets she is bound.
And yet, they have the audacity
to call her strong,
as if survival were a virtue,
as if the act of enduring
what no one should have to endure
was something to be applauded.
She wants to scream at them:
“Do not call me strong—call me shackled. Call me stolen.
Call me a graveyard of all the things I was never allowed to keep.”
©susanne
S