Riding Shotgun

Because I was young and breathed, trembling, and cried too much, too often
And I asked my mother permission to bury me
They stuck me in many many cars
And told me to get better, however and whatever
getting better meant to me.
And there I sat
In the back seat, shotgun, driver’s seat of my
Cereal-scarred mini-van,
I discovered therapy and hated it for its obsolescence, because I didn’t need a doctor to tell me I was sick, I needed the cure
Which no one told me I could have, because I
“Needed to find it for myself.”
“Wasn’t all that bad, really.”
They saw my sins written up to my elbows and
The longer they looked, the less they wanted to see,
They saw, instead,
A case study.
So inside the car I went again, and again, up against the door, legs sprawled on the pleather seats
and from the rearview mirror I must have looked like a dead body.
And all this time inside cars made me thick-skinned.
The greatest virtue of my helpers, my betters, was making me understand that deception was natural, real, thick in the air of everyone around me
And so I too started to deceive,
Rolled down my sleeves and rolled down the windows
When we drove the highway, the wind
Punching my eardrums, my mother, desperate and
Punching me with teary words, but it all seemed like pointless noise
From inside that car everything moved so fast
I wouldn’t have to worry about time passing
Until at once I could no longer deceive and I shredded my mask,
Tugged off my sweater, sticky in June, stuck in myself
A girl who has terrible vision
But is not yet blinded
Blinded by deception
Blinded by the realities of hate,
As if hate is the only thing that gives off heat
Rather than an embrace.
A girl who finds a way to be her own heat
And knows this:
Peace is not slit wrists.