Letter to my younger flesh

Poetry Finnley Silveria

Tracy, California, USA

What you’re feeling right now isn’t normal. That may seem blunt or unfair or untruthful But it is blunt and unfair and truthful. Those around you who tell you what you are feeling is normal aren’t lying out of a sense of hatred or dishonesty or kindness even But because they themselves do not realize the lie they have been entrenched in

In time, you will learn the words for your thoughts Your feelings Your behaviors A list of diagnoses for behaviors long ignored But that’s later.

For now You sit in the front left corner of each class Aching for a time when you felt integrated into your education Wondering, as you barely skate by with an A, how anyone else manages You’ll turn in your test first, not bothering to double check your math The solution seemingly simple: I must just be lazy I must just be wanting attention I must just be stupid

For now You sit in the corner of your bed, staring out to the corner of your room The front left corner Waiting for a figure to come back out of the wall and comfort you to sleep Everyone feels like this you’ll mumble Waiting for the clicks of the keyboard down the hall to signify safety That someone is scaring off the monsters to keep you safe Even as you get older and face adulthood down like an unloaded shotgun Unsure if there are bullets and fearing that there are not

This isn’t normal- for anyone except for you This isn’t normal but that doesn’t make it cancerous Doesn’t make it an error or a glitch But simply a function You always say you are like a computer, one with too many programs open and music playing from tabs that you thought were closed but simply froze Let’s add on to that analogy

You and I Lady to man Survivor to abuser

You are like a computer but unlike one in many ways The windows you thought were closed are called trauma Software you thought was deleted from the hard drive, but the files still stay Standing in the front left corner of each room you lay in Your hyperactive anti-virus protecting you from all the wrong things Letting those files stand while screaming about how the doors are all askew How there is a bug in your brain and the only way you can get it out is with a hole through your skull How much danger you are always in despite laying in bed in a locked house in a locked room with a knife in your bedside table ( The knife won’t come until you’re in your twenties in a literal form but still exists to you now- then Whenever you are )

So, to my younger flesh- sweeter and soft but feeling like rot on the inside You are not a computer. You are made of flesh and blood and bones. There isn’t any chip in your brain or sense of normalcy in anything. Write this down on your scars Your arms covered in notes and doodles and scratches You are not normal. Thank whatever god your friends’ worship for that as I will thank the Gods we befriend in the years ahead. We are not normal except to ourselves.