The spiraling shape

Ken stopped in to visit at work today.

He's doing very well, editing medical texts, and he's a new daddy, with twins just a few days old. He showed me a picture he had on his cell phone, and they're very cute.

It's weird how he'd resurface now, of all times, after I haven't seen him in what, a year, maybe more? Odd how life always circles back around and how things always seem to happen right when you need them to. Seeing Ken reminded me of how much things have changed since he left, and that's just what I needed, really.

Rough draft: Unspoken

They say
what doesn't kill you
makes you stronger.

If that's true,
then I am steel,
unyielding,
rock-solid,
yet malleable
if you know how to work with it.

And I have been worked with,
worked over,
bent, shaped, molded,
weak under a facade of OK,
tears turning swiftly to screams,
great yawps of anguish,
pain,
self-hatred,
fierce venom vented out
and simmered in.

Numb, cold, I mistook this
for alright, level, over it,
out of the dark
and into the comparatively bright.

Second wave, pain
plus shock, there's more?
It's not over
until I sing,
and the wound was only
half-healed, after all.

But out, up,
the hardest lesson ever
forced into my head,
gagged down as my mind
threatened to choke,
it went down hard,
but it stayed down,
bitter but warm.

Fuck all y'all,
I thought.

This less than
should be an equal to,
dammit,
and why do they get to dictate
who I am, what I am,
and not me?

Value lies not
in the eye of the beholder,
but in the eye
of the owner.

Clawing, scratching,
I grasp at worthiness
until I possess it,
possess myself.

Thank you for hurting me.
Thank you for the pain
you didn't know you gave me.
Without it, I would still be
nothing, worthless by
self-fulfilling prophecy.