____________________________________

This is the last sad poem

From today on I won’t write about

All the lost shards from when I had my heart chopped and thrown into a blender

Mixed with a 100ml of tears

And a sack full of words I never said

And how I felt each and every cut echo through my body when you flipped the switch and watched the red hurricane of my pain with a sadistic smile on your face

and a laugh in your throat that hallowed out  the rest of my insides

Like an empty discarded avocado cover

From a breakfast of bacon, eggs and waffles served on the granite counter tops of my glazed over

Lifeless eyes

This is the last time I write about

How the “and” between “Mom and dad” became a gaping void little by little as my pre-pubertal self was torn into two incomplete halves before I had a chance to figure out who or what the fuck I was and

How I buried myself in books and solitude, kept warm by the notion that if no one is around, no one can ever leave me and no one can ever tear me apart again.

This is the last time I write about how

I spent those first six months

In a brand new house

In a brand new city

At a brand new school

Making brand new friends

When I hardly managed to do it the first or second time

Yes, my parents did that shit to me twice

This is the last time I write about How my dad and sister went five years without speaking and how my parents still don’t speak

So I sometimes still have anxious nightmares about those summers when I would take all my shit from one car to the other at a central meeting point without either one of them getting out of their cars to hug me hello or goodbye or how I’m afraid to say my mother’s name around my dad because I know that he has scars just as deep as mine even though we’ve never shown them to one another.

Even though we just polish each other’s fake smiles every time I have to say the word “mom” and choke on it without fail

This is the last time I write about

Those six months I went without seeing my father and how on that bus ride to Pretoria that winter afternoon in the middle of June I asked myself if he even wanted to see me at all.

How he hugged me in a way I wasn’t familiar with and felt slightly unnerved and suffocated by

Because he knew he was losing me the moment he saw me for the first time in half a year and found himself looking at

A stranger

Fast approaching his height

Stealing his forehead

And mirroring the twist in his sense of humour that not everybody gets

But is an expression of his deepest love

When for the first time in recorded memory he called me “my boy” and I spent the next couple of weeks wondering just how much he had been through and if any of it was my fault

How I went close to 10 years without seeing his side of the family and how every encounter with them starts with 5 hours of awkward silences and questions about

How I’m doing

What I’m studying

Where my mother is

Why I’ve been hiding

More silence

How I’m doing

What I’m studying

Where my mother is

Why I’ve been hiding

More silence

How I’m doing

How I’m doing

How I’m doing

Ending with

“Greet him”

And

“Greet her”

“It was good seeing you”

“Come back soon”

And then I disappear for another four long years

Why are you hiding?

Why are you hiding?

Why are you hiding?