Whipped Then Wild

Sable Mare, Mouth Full of Muzzle

This isn’t a golden narrative. There’s no polish here. Just wet hands and a lump of memory I keep reworking, even as it collapses under its own weight. Maybe you wanted gold. Clean arcs. A redemption worth framing. But I only have clay—cracked, repurposed, remade. 

This is the structure I’ve made.

Life after suicide attempt pin-needles my cheeks wide to smile for the divination of my survival. To peers. To twats. To family who loves loudly but silences the part of me that no longer yearns to exist. I remember the ache I felt, maybe questioning if I really wanted to die or at least scream the pain in a much more insane vain – I didn’t care of which out-come would proceed. I didn’t care which came first: the release or the rupture. 

I don’t know if I ever truly       

           wanted to live again. 

I remember the days after, the psychiatric stay of  “silent rooms” in which they held the kids who misbehaved, who spoke too much in the hallways. The rest of us floated through routines: doorless rooms, silent lunch tables, the smell of bleach and bland food where we sat and stared around muted-toned childhood rainbows splashed across cabinantes and ice cold ac that blasted onto the cold rubber dot-speckled floors, sterilizing. 

My mother with my aunt whom slept amongst stiff hospital chairs, waiting through the endless hours before I was transferred there– were so tired, you could see it in the limp under her sable eyes yet they kept a gently smile towards me. I  didn’t want her to leave again.      And again.      And again.      And again.

 I didn’t want to always feel as if, I was alone in a home with a conspiracy-theory riddled brother and a school where I was one of the few Black girls expected to represent everything I wasn’t yet allowed to become. I didn’t want the next uber ribes called place to place, the empty-seated shows, the long sickness that could not be meded simply because doctors refused to see me with no, no one else there. But as I layed, charcoal-belly filled – I felt nothing less than selfish, as if my existence had become a sorrowed-burden. She refused their want for medication, she refused the use of inhibiting societal chemical-devinity through pilled incorporation. Said she believed in prayer, amens, hymns, rituals – and  forgetting. And like the kid, raising amongst my own desire, lacking of constant routine– 

I’ve never been a fan of medicine myself. 

I remember choking upon thousands of pearls–too many pills to count– till ringing and waves of blue red came to snatch them from my throat as my mother screamed, layed on the floor heart clutched. When her heart attack happaned last year, my mother refused to tell me till months had passed– too scared. Too scared she had welcomed a child to moldablely-tender that i was to mishape under childlike thumbed pressure. But recently, I have found out through my own pulsating heart, 2 blood packs snaking into my veins, and crazed-thoughts that signs of surrounding decay revelled a pre-telling of my dismay – that I have an auto-immune disease. 

Autoimmune disease is a condition where the body's immune system, which normally protects against foreign invaders, mistakenly attacks its own healthy tissues and organs. This attack can cause inflammation and damage, leading to a wide range of symptoms and impacting various parts of the body. 

My blood was attacking itself. Grasping, ripping, scattering    itself.

And as months ensued, and my mom buried treasure in elixirs, prayers, and promises made with a dead women, I truly never want to take a medicine. 

I sometimes even think, my body finally understands – In this capitalist, authoritarian world, prosperity demands a self trembling to mold—plastic, pliable, performative. Quick-Used for game, shame, tease, and ease 

Or more explicity

Stroke/Choke

Lure/Blur

Feign/Pain

Or Love than float to the above, a girl of such dismay should learn not to be so still. 

I grew threw stillness, smiles, and silence as protection.

I’ve whelmed up emotions is solemn rooms encapassed in onyx shadow, cricketted-rambles scared to speak.

Daddy, do you realize how scared you made me to speak?

My people-pleasing attributes started with a spill of popcorn. 

I was clumsy pre-middle school era and frankly, in need of glasses, cause my coordination was shit. Yet, it was this fall specifically in front of my father that changed me. How the half-cooked kernels spun upon the floor alongside the thud of my body, making his nose crinkle n’ his lips utter a sour whiskey scream. Unclapsing each golden buckle and letting his belt slither out, he winded the leather within his grasp before telling me to reach out my hands. Shivering my small buttered palms in front of him on my knees until they bruised of grape jelly. The more I cried the more he slashed each arm, and more and more silent I became. Till all I heard was his huffing coughs, and run-on sentences, and my echoed “sorry.” I didn't need many lessons as I saw how he would whip my brothers till they bloused, and insult my mother with threats over her head. I heard of the stories of how she would run outside the house screaming with her clothes torn, my brothers teachers calling cops because the blueberries buttering their skin; All I needed to know was that silence, filled with apology. But outside the borders of my home, my silent dismissal of autonomy never granted me safety. How foolish to beat black child like a whipped slave. And I know no one is holding a belt to my palms yet, who am I without what has kept me safe; how do I find what makes me feel safe again? Especially when it's too late. 

Especially after being—

…you know. The word mothers avoid  when they want to pray but don’t want you to feel like the demonic plague, “You will learn from these mistakes.” I'll learn how to behave when a man begs and whines like a dog at a pound, how I leave a scene when I’m a deer in headlight sheen. 

This is all fluffy ways of saying, 

I was r— terrible at not being afraid. 

And it’s hard to say.

How awkward to tell your mother, someone’s baby shoved into me with pain in my eyes, silently beckoning they owned my body with disregard of my lacked assist. And that your silence wasn’t survival—it was compliance trained into you like obedience. Isn’t this the best thing about humanity, how tragic it can be? How easy it is to say, “That’s not me.” thought that helps people sleep? Makes you feel like a hero, a leader, maybe even falsely unique. It must be painful, for those who know behind the charades of forgotten malice lies the temptation of self-incrimination. We the humans of all-demon and all-god, how can we recollect the pieces of us that have been beaten?

I want to be received, not perceived. How obscure being of mud molded the inklings of your structure? For some, it is forged of iron, and gold, for they must endure flamed beasts but those of clay, Clay bears fingerprints.

It cracks. It reshapes.

It remembers–don’t it hurt to have those fingers sway your lean? May you sadden that the burden of gold is the beauty of its completion? Though your edges are smooth, I feel they’ve burnt off the grooves that naturally encompassed the shape of you. I ask if not for the safety of your society— I worry how the cracks will sway,    mold    . How beautiful it must be, painted and shaped, into a multitude of things. For gold can only be molded into one thing, extraordinary. 

Golden, it must be. It must be. 

But, what happens when clay is kneaded by belt buckle ?  

What do the sable horses become?