Why I Never Visit.

Why I Never Visit

Well; You asked me why I never visit.

The scent of pasta sauce and pasta dough fermenting wafted through the small, one room apartment in Manhattan. It was it always cold here, so cold that the bones shook and blood iced over. It had been years since the thought had crossed my mind, and once it passed into my head and out my ear like the whisper of dark thoughts night-time wind carried… my heart couldn't help but to ache. Was it bad I missed them? Was I at fault? My teeth dug into my bottom lip, breaking skin as the familiar taste of iron slowly trickled into my mouth.

My apron was dusted in flour and splashes of milk stained the once pearl white fabric, dying it a pale yellow color even after a number of continuous washes.

Maybe it was the fear of drinking that had followed after your outbursts, or how the spite and self hatred you spat out to me had burrowed under my skin and latched to my soul, but I new why I could not not visit you.

You had harmed me in ways that had damaged me like broken glass, so much so that the extensive years of therapy I had went still could not stitch up the wounds you had jagged open onto my mental state and well being.

I knew why, I could not visit.

You sculpted me to confuse abuse with love, and when my lover hit me hard and forced his lips against mine despite how many times I had forced out the word ‘no’, I still believed he loved me. For that is similar to how you once treated me.

I knew why, I could not visit.

But for now, my worries were the scars left behind, if be on my wrist or mind, and the burning smell of pasta sauce.

Dinner would be late tonight, I knew.

And i will not have kids, or marry, open up or smile again like I once had when I was five before your hands had crushed the hopes and aspirations of little old me growing as being something more that the ones who raised me. Before your habds had danced their ways in between mt heart and had torn me to shreds before any lovesick, puppy eyed boy could.

And I would not visit.

Because you did not deserve me then, and you do not deserve me now.

And I will grow.

I will grow like a rose; cursed between cracks of concrete, cursed to be stepped on by passerbys and left to wilt. Left for my already stripped away petals too crush between the soles of a strangers feet.

I had learned how to shrink so small that I was barely taking up space. I had learned how to hold my knees to mt chest and hold my hands over my ears...

and just, pray that things would end up fine.

But father,

things are not fine.

That is why I refuse to visit you, father.

I refuse to reminisce in the bubble baths of self hatred you had made for me. I refuse to base my worth off my silence, I refuse to let your tipsy, sexist senseless blabbering to cut my skin up like the thords of a rose, poking holes into my arms and leaving me to watch the trickling of velvet cascade down my tan arms.

I had gotten used to stinging showers and the scent of herbs...

The kind of herbs you cannot buy at the grocery store.

The kind you buy off shadey street corners, from boys broken just as me.

With the lines go shake of my head; I turn too see how my once lovely pasta sauce had turned to an eerie, black vat of burning goo...

Quite unfit of human consumption, and with smoke burning already blurry eyes, I had been forced to crack open a window.

And yet; no matter how much fresh air I fanned into the small, dingy kitchen I had... my chest is tight and I cannot breathe.