Piety to Us

A Poem by rrcable

A poem depicting the loyalty between myself and the better half of myself that has always kept me alive through everything I have gone through.

We’ve been through a lot in the short eighteen years we have lived and breathed.

The weight of expectations have always weighed heavy on us since before we can remember.

“Independent” became our middle name as our brother expected us to take care of him, all the while mom and dad expected us to take care of ourselves.

We grew heavy with expectations and anxiety as we were soon expected to keep the secrets of every session of a mysterious game of “Firetruck”.

The secrets swelled as the expectations grew, the expectations grew as the responsibilities swelled, we became an adult before we even knew how to be a child.

The fondness of those days leaves a bittersweet, metallic taste in our mouth because we both know that our existence was constricted to the 149,760 beats per day that solely kept us alive.

We worked overtime to cover down where others covered up, mom missing all the time, dad gone with no trace of ever coming back, we gave our brother all of what we were in order to protect him from what we were witnessing.

We remember the nights full of fear, the screaming, the crying, holding onto each other telling him that we won’t let anything happen to him.

We are still wounded by those memories, the pain is still too tight in our chest to remember them clearly.

Our brother was the last person we remember us feeling genuine emotion for, after that, we stopped feeling.

The numbness of our body, our mind, and our soul, we felt nothing.

We acknowledged the abuse, the emotional, the physical, the spiritual, the sexual, and the mental, we knew it all but we were still numb.

We remained numb until we found where we belonged at long last, we found a family that knew nothing about us but welcomed us with open arms because in this new family, we were all green.

We weren’t numb or broken, we didn’t need labels or titles, we were just green.

The numbness fell away as we started to feel again, the expectations were no longer weighing us down as our new family expected nothing from us.

We made our home here and we became content in feeling what we wanted to feel, but then we felt the explosion that changed everything.

We started to hurt again, but it wasn’t pain that was causing this hurt, it was something that could cut deeper than pain ever could.

We felt something new, something volatile and it was starting to change us.

We haven’t been the same since that explosion, and things are only still changing now, but that explosive feeling keeps spreading throughout our body every day that we get to wake up and breathe.

WE have been through a lot, but there is no one else I would rather go through all my life with except you.

We are one in the same, without you there is no me and without me there is no you, but we are a team, a team that has conflicted against one another and has loved together to feel new things in our short eighteen year span.

We will go through many more experiences in the next sixty years, but I know that you will never fail me because, my dear heart, the day that you stop beating is the day that I am finally, truly alone.