Reclaimed

I thought I was growing up faster by giving myself away,

lending my bad traits out, wrapping my uniqueness in star-printed paper.

I realize now that I’m in the business of reclaiming myself.

I didn’t know 

I wanted to take me back.

I didn’t know.

I need to admire my hair because it makes me want to shake about

and dance and groove and spin and bounce along with my curls,

not because you once told me you could lose yourself in its twists and turns.

I long to look at my stomach in the mirror and love it 

for its soft stretch-marked record of the days 
I spent stumbling into the word ‘woman,’

not hate it for the time he took the extra food off my plate 
and patted my belly as if to say,
“no no, this is your fault, you are better than this.”

He was right. I am better than that.

I’m better than that old mental snapshot of myself, 

sectioned limb from limb into a million fragments of other people’s opinions. 

I am the sum total of all the times I’ve laughed so hard I cried. 

I am the cumulative effect of all the moments I’ve spent 

running in a thunderstorm and smiling at fireflies.
I am the gold flecks in my eyes in the sunlight, with
or without mascara. I am made entirely of the glowing moments,

like pressing my back to the grass, staring at stars on stars and feeling 

so lifted yet within my body, stretched out upon the ground.

I want to adore my feet for the places they’ve carried me, 

for the shoes they’ve danced to shreds and the cliffs they’ve sprung off,

not avoid looking too hard at them in fear of remembering the day 

you massaged the hurt out of them, because it inevitably reminds me 

that you’re not going to take my heart in your hands and squeeze 

it till it fits back together again like a hunk of clay, no scars, new.

I ache to accept that my heart is not something to be fixed,

that it can proudly wear the layered glaze of every person I’ve known,

that all the colors of their laughs and words and sweet sighs 
can mix, swirl, melt, harden -
and I can wear it around my neck,
hanging a little to the left,

like a pendant to be proud of - 
not a martyr’s bleeding heart,

but a precious gift to me, reclaimed

and to you, forgiven.

poem - July 2012