hey guys i wrote this poem bc i was upset and its not satire but im fine, i have people i can talk to (scratch team pls dont take this down lol) i may delete this later cus its just very emotional.
She says it’s only an hour, as if time grows softer when she’s the one holding it, as if my minutes don’t belong to me. She calls it discipline. I call it being carved into a version of myself I didn’t choose. She asks why I’m upset but talks over the answer. She wants a conversation but not a voice. She wants respect but not reflection. She wants closeness but only if I fold myself small enough to fit her idea of it. The violin sits in my lap, strings loose, slightly aching like me. She jokes, “Did you learn that from the last instrument you played?” as if cutting me down makes her logic taller. I answer softly, truthfully, “You don’t even know how to play one.” No raised voice, no edge, just honesty but honesty is forbidden here unless it’s hers. So she twists my words, molds them into things I never said, fights shadows she built herself, and still tells me I’m the one causing trouble. Then the warning: “I don’t want to have to engrave it into your mind physically.” A sentence I’m expected to swallow quietly. She sends me to my brother to be “talked to,” as if I need to borrow someone else’s thoughts. He nods with her because that’s safer than truth. We both know it. And still, she says she wants us to be close. That I never tell her anything. But she closes every door the moment I try to open one. Meanwhile my friend’s mom knows things about me my own mother doesn’t. I didn’t even have to tell her; she just listened, noticed, held space without taking it. Sometimes the people who aren’t yours feel more like home than the ones who are. I watch my mom trying to rewrite her own childhood through me, pushing her “should’ve beens” into my already full hands. And I think: if she listened really listened this wouldn’t feel like a battlefield. But here’s the truth: she can take things from me my hours, my freedom, my still-growing voice, the slim places where peace fits. She can take and take and take. But she never stops to think about the cost of all that taking. She forgets that you can lose someone without them ever walking away. That distance isn’t measured in miles it’s measured in how many times you’ve had to swallow yourself just to keep the peace, how many pieces of yourself you quietly take back because you can’t trust her with them anymore. And sometimes I wonder: when does it get better? When I shut my mouth? When I stop feeling? When I finally meet expectations she can’t even hold herself to? Or only when there’s nothing left to take…? One day she’ll reach for a closeness she thinks still exists and wonder why it feels like smoke slipping through her hands. She won’t understand that the moment she stopped hearing me, a part of me stopped trying to be heard. And there's just one more thing I could take away that she can never get back. i can't wait until im 18
