These Tears Are Not My Own Poem by Chelisa Eves

“Try not to let what she says get to you.” Daddy, I can’t. Everything she says is poison and I’m the med-kit without the anti-venom. Daddy, where other people –normal people- have that nagging doubting voice I have her, but she’s even worse. She follows me into my dreams, but she makes my wakeful life the nightmare. I don’t turn a corner or answer a question without getting that little ache –the one final barb she gets to throw as the adult in the relationship – stinging beneath the illusion of thick skin.
That I’m not good enough.
That I’m not doing enough.
And sometimes I let it get to me, and I feel so like a thief stealing calories I don’t deserve that I avoid them like plague, and sometimes I let something or someone slam my bad leg a bit too hard to distract myself. Sometimes I even slam it a bit too hard –a hand, a knee, a hip- to pay attention to something that isn’t my pain. I dig nails into the skin of my palms and tear away that thickness to get inside so that I can get away from her ringing in my ears. I bury myself under my own thick skin like the covers of my bed at night and let that tiny self weep in the dark while the lightning is clashing and the thunder is smashing at my doors and windows and eardrums like a criminal trying to break inside.
Daddy, she gets me every time; a new trap or a new trick or a new sugar-coated question that sticks the knife in my throat. It closes my esophagus over the words my mind is screaming and ranting as it rails against my skull like it were a prison cell and not a haven. I can feel it pounding its way to freedom and the headaches I get from crying must be from all the things I don’t have the courage to say out loud to you.
The tears on my cheeks are not my own; they’re the tears of a girl delirious on her mother’s bed at night, shaking at the sight of monsters seeping out of the walls; they’re the tears of a girl who doesn’t belong anywhere, even if she’s crossed the country more times than she’d like to remember; they’re the tears of a girl who won’t say something’s wrong because who knows where she’ll end up next.
They’re the tears of a girl who spends those wakeful nights tossing and turning, wondering about God, and why he hates faggots and why she’s considered suicide as an answer so many more times than she has considered reaching out for help. And then she wonders how she’s supposed to reach out for help when she’s too frightened of putting her problem into words, because words have power, and saying that she’s depressed or wants medication for it makes it too real; too like the monsters seeping from her bedroom walls at night or the fact that she’s made her own home within her “thick skin” instead of any house she’s lived in.
So she just stays in bed and plagues herself with questions she can’t bear to hear the real answers to. She lets her body become the victim of her mind and she lets herself harass and bully it until her step-mother isn’t the only one whose voice is ringing in her ears. She ruins herself with taunts she’s only dreamed of, thinking things hysterics scream of, and wondering about all the times she’s felt loved.
Is it because your parents are divorced?
Is it because you were a lonely child?
Are you being abused by someone?
Are you abusing yourself?
How did you find out?
How do you know?
Are you sure?
She doesn’t want to hear herself ask it, but she asks herself those questions in the dark, riddled with insecurity as she lies awake wishing she could just like guys and be less complicated and be less fat and eat less and be less-
and how long do you think it’s been since she’s said: “I love myself.”
I can tell you, because I know that girl. It’s been a long time, longer than it’s been since I’ve come home and not worried about what would be inside, and she is disastrously overdue. She’s deprived herself of something she had every right to and she has no reason to. She may not like guys, but there should not be a lack of love, least of all for someone like her to have for herself.
Asexuality is not a disease or a virus, something she can overcome or outrun or dose away with some shiny drugstore prescriptions. She has the emotional needs of everyone else; sometimes she’s even happier on her own, but she just wants to be loved. She doesn’t desire them. She desires to know someone as deeply as she knows the crevices and the nooks and the crannies of her mind, and to let them see it all at once like a spoilt surprise.
She didn’t want to hear straight, married women talking about crying themselves to sleep at night while their partners were right beside them when she goes to bed alone and has only herself for comfort. She wants to hear about someone’s day and to know that they give a damn if she liked stuff or if she really liked the way she dressed, or if she was happy at school, or if she was being picked on. She wanted someone to tell her ‘no’, she wasn’t fat, and to eat ice cream with her while she told him about all the horrible things she’d been told.
About her weight.
About her bad leg.
About her grades.
About her past.
About the nagging scars all over that she hated people to see.
She wanted a partner to trace those scars and tell her she was beautiful, and small and fragile, and that they ‘would do that, honey’. She wanted to be fragile and sensitive for once, to peel away the thick skin she’d pulled tight around her like the hoodie with the drawstrings she wore on bad days to hide her stomach, or the blankets on her bed at night to muffle her sobs of ‘why, why, WHY? ! ’ because she doesn’t understand what she’s doing wrong.
Why it’s not working.
Why she’s still hurting.
How she’s going to tell her parents they’ll never see grandchildren from her. How she’ll get out of another uncomfortable family occasion to avoid saying the wrong thing. How she’ll avoid speaking at the right time because she’ll damn herself with whatever truthful opinion comes out of her mouth and falls into the growing gap between her and them.
And all these ‘how’s and ‘why’s are rushing around her brain and running up and down her spine like the cold shivers she got walking home in the dark at night. They seep into the pores of her skin, burning icy-hot like a new terrible poison, and they scatter through her bloodstream like a viral infection. She lets it run through her, knowing the next day will be just the same, but she can’t muster up enough bluster to put up a fight against it.
She can’t rail against it anymore; her brain is too tired and her body is worn out like a pair of old jeans, too roomy in the hips now from the growing and the shrinking, and it doesn’t fight her when she shucks it off at night with the help of her word processor and puts herself somewhere else for a few moments of solace.
She finds herself in the spaces between the characters of the text that she keeps to herself; the tiny dreams and the half-hearted tales of adventure and truth and so much real that she can’t manage to pour from her lips like the waterfalls of Rivendell or the blood of the villain impaled on the heroine’s sword. She imagines she’s in a sea of smiling faces, even when she’s not, but it has to end sometime so she lets her friends bid her farewell for the night and she struggles back into the flesh she’d forgotten was hers.
Again she’s fat. Again she’s sad. Again she’s different. Again she’s selfish, stubborn, rude, ungrateful. And the story begins all over again, because that’s exactly how my step-mother describes me.