Stranger, sister...

I see your sunken eyes, I know

what you're doing

I know why

Sister... How strange to call you that

Our past is shaded,

shared only by a "father"

who

my longing to know as a child

became

A longing that you never did, and

I wonder if he ever wonders

of either of us behind the metal bars

caged like a mad dog...

If he ever cared how he was supposed to keep you safe

If he ever cared about your mother's well being

If he ever cared when my mom gave herself out of grief

I used to feel left out knowing I'd never have someone

to walk me down the isle, to

have chased away the "bad boys" as a teen before

we learned that feeling less is the only thing

that feels like more than this life

What a shame that it was my mother's best friend

instead of her to tell me the truth

the one in the picture in an old photo album

climbing down from inside their

high school roof onto soda machines, with his first corn dog

I think he had the munchies

he always treated me like I was worth something even when

no one else did, not even myself

I love that picture

he was the only honest voice to speak of our father, before...

My only picture is the mugshot, but I heard he

used to love music

I see your sunken eyes, I know

what you're doing

I know why

You say you're better now to the world

the last last time

but you don't say that, to me

We met once

waiting to see the judge

I'll never forget how we hugged like all our lives

we'd played barbies and giggled about boys

But my mother, trying to protect me

insured that

We never got the chance

I remember when I found you online

Found the truth

You'd searched for me for so many years

I couldn't believe it, at first...

Could I have protected you?

You look so much like me, but prettier, even

with what your escape attempts have done to you

We both have our fathers eyes

both filled with different pain

overflowing past the smiles

we plant so carefully like eyeliner

painted on just right

He reminded my mother of his younger brother, her

first and only true love

who died in a car accident

I don't know much about your mother

I was told she was a junkie, yet

It feels like a lie

We could have been so close

We could have been sisters

What if we had been born in swapped lives?

What if we had just had a fighting chance in either?

What does it change that your tormentor is jailed?

What does it make better that a brutal beating,

or my own encounter

with a man, though not one to me known, that they

Jailed him?

Thinking about it makes me want to

forget, too

in that space where reality's a tide and

the numbness consumes you, the

only time it doesn't hurt so much

I message you, yet

you never respond, anymore

and I become desperately helpless

I don't want to see you become

another statistic

where no one sees who they really were, who

could have been- could be any one of us next

with the slightest slip

So many have been lost, I know

but do you really want to join them so badly you follow suit

This only ends one way

In a town so desperate to escape

that if we can't leave in our bodies, we leave in our minds

one after another never to return

Is this what we meant when we swore that one day

we'd leave this town and never look back

Please come back...

I see your sunken eyes, I know

what you're doing

I know why