The Tragedy of Twenty

       

I'll be 20 next year.
It'll just be another Tuesday night.
I'll be in my bedroom,
mourning the loss of my childhood
and crying out my eyes.

It's just another Tuesday,
and I'm just another girl
among billions,
who were destined to be ruined by civilization,
searching for solace in their generation,
when there's none that exists in the world.
So, I'll go back to my poems, my music, and my colorful pens.
I'm just another artist—pretentious and pessimistic,
with nothing to write and so much to scream.

I'll be 20 next year,
but sometimes I still feel like a child,
on my knees with joined hands,
apologies on my lips like a prayer,
begging for penance
from my mother.

Oh, mother, why don't you swallow me whole?
I'll come back as someone who will make you proud.
I'll try not to be someone who thinks in
busted knuckles and hoisted flags
in front of the House of Commons,
with police vans screaming down her doorway
and unresolved cases piling up on her résumé.

I'll be 20 next year, and
I still carry around love in my pockets, like coconut biscuits,
that remind me of home and dread.
It burns a hole in them, and it costs me my pride,
chasing away the butterflies, turning them into dust.

I look for them when the loneliness of my walls starts closing in on me,
listening to the sound of my tears and my mother's lullaby.
"What is love?" I ask her.
She smiles.
Maybe she doesn't know either.

I'll be 20 next year.
The years behind me burning like the books a young boy tossed in the fire for some warmth,
both reduced to ashes and glare.
And when I—
if I turn 40,
maybe I will find myself agonizing over what could've been.
Had I chosen something different, been someone different,
I wonder what has become of the boy, whether he braved the winters, found a family, made a family,
still rubbing stones for warmth,
thinking the same things as me, of all the what-ifs.

You'll be 20 next year,
I say to the girl who couldn't picture anything past 18:
You make your coffee a little too sweet now
to swallow down with the bitterness of your life.
Photographs stay blurry with make-believe smiles,
hiding the self-loathing and death in your eyes.
You write about death in almost everything,
but when people ask, you smile and say you're alive.

But today you're 19 years, 38 weeks, and 2 days old,
preparing to say goodbye to your childhood,
and writing shitty poems, waiting for your friends to text
so you can escape this feeling of emptiness and fear.
I'm nineteen and I'm on fire,
swaying with my ghosts near my grave,
watching the flames dance on my skin
to my mother's lullaby.