you are born in blood

and cry for something unnamed

yearning for soft love

your emotions are

too big for your body, and

you want to catch up

but young adulthood

brings loneliness in u-hauls

and loved ones fading

is this life? just change

and love and loss and feeling

so much you might die?

and then death arrives

so gently, and carries you

back to your old room

I am three and I am seven and I am nine and I am thirteen and seventeen and twenty and more, numbers climbing every year as they do for everyone, but don't let Mom hear that, she'll pout and then breathe heavily in the other direction as she digests your words like she is chewing rocks.

She looks at you like she is a planet in orbit that knows that one day, it will crash into you and ruin itself at the chance of taking you down with it. Your beauty is her biggest accomplishment, and your flaws are her personal failures, or maybe your dad's.

I'll beat the dough by hand like she does, because the blender is too expensive and noisy, and I'll cut my own hair with craft scissors at the same age as she did, and I'll give my pets human names like her own, and join sports teams like she did, except maybe I won't always like succeed in them like she did, and I am just a wanderer who only trekking across the field for a brief moment in time. And so I want to hide away where no one can find me like she does, maybe in a forest clearing like when I was a child, or maybe through sheer willpower I can fit myself into a cabinet that I haven't been able to fit in for hide-and-seek since I was eleven years old, because even now I am still trying to find traces of when I was small enough to be free.

I hope I never have a daughter because if she is born looking like me, I worry I will never be able to tell her she is beautiful.