Petals
I grew like a flower in the attic
I grew like a rose out the floorboards creeping out of the basement in spring. Now sometimes I see a faint shadow following me a ghostly little version of the girl I used to be. And I watch the way her eyes observe me as she takes all her cues from everything I've done from everything I've been. I grew like a flower in the attic and I’ve grown used to the feeling of my shadow of her trust in me how what she would tell nobody else she still tells me. Sometimes I take her out in summertime down to English Bay to buy ice cream and walk along the beach. The first weekend of August I took her downtown to watch the parade and it was all bright colours, all love, all Madonna songs throngs of people and the air was so thick we couldn't breathe. She told me this day was the most beautiful she'd seen. She grew up even lonelier than me so still, she wants to sit at my feet to learn everything there is to know about me. She looked up at me as we walked side by side on the beach and in this moment, there was that little glitch in the universe a skip in time when I knew, I knew that she was made to be mine. My daughter, my second try, a second pair of my eyes. She grew up to follow me. I still don't know how or why because the stories I told her, all those pieces of my life clipped and muted and drained in nostalgia-- they were never hers to keep. Just because love was only a temporary thing for me a hand reaching, desperate and frantic and hungry but never to live and never to stay it didn't mean that her life was destined to turn out that way too. But somehow she believed in me. Somehow she believed that her path would follow mine. Maybe I let her. Maybe I notice the way her hair glows blonde in the summer like mine used to though it darkened each year that I aged. She’s very smart, she places her phone facedown on the side of the bed. She doesn’t check it. She doesn’t look to see who might be calling or worse, who might not be. Who might never look to tie her down… we both know free is only the second-best thing to be. I could cut her off from the world if I wanted to put a stop to her heart, to all future mistakes and maybe I do. She might follow me all the way down to an old abandoned house overgrown with vines, and the walls might start to cave so we just wouldn’t think. We just wouldn’t breathe. But I could cut her off from the world without drawing in a breath. I could, and maybe I want to. She came to me upon a breeze like the petals in spring and I could hold her beneath my fingertips I could turn her back to dust again. I could, and maybe I want to.