LOUD.

I was six.

I was happy, and loved.

I relished in the world around me, dancing with no care and singing, because I knew the whole world was listening.

And I was Loud

Very, very Loud

I wrestled with the sun, and terrified the stars,

Racing the streets like they were the speed of light, my feet pounding with echoes of defiance

I feared nothing and no one

For I knew I was born to make history,

And history was born to mark me

For years I wondered why that changed

Left counting my loneliness like bruises on my legs

Blaming myself for insecurities I was taught

I don’t remember the change

I just remember the impact

I went from taunting the earth

To tying my shoelaces

I learned how to bottle up my emotions like rain and let them drip, calculated, onto a lined piece of paper

I forgot how to see my universe

And learned to write it instead

I stopped fighting

And started to listen

I never realized how much I lost in those two years

Because I couldn’t remember what it was like to be me

But I knew something felt wrong

I felt captured,

Put on display like a glowing jellyfish,

In an aquarium filled to the brim with nothingness

Commercialized for everyone,

And yet no one came

They trapped my soul in the lining of books,

Told me to shut my mouth and open my palm

Gave me machines to teach me how to write,

And headphones to force me to listen

I was so Loud

And I needed to be shut up.

I thought it was my fault.

I thought I was

Wrong.

I hated myself

Do you recognize that I hated myself?

Each year brought a new excuse as to why I was born to suffer

Suffer in a body meant to sing,

And left to the silence of time.

Dad,

I blamed myself.

I threw everything I had into my creations because I knew that in those crumpled up papers,

That shredded fabric stuck with old scotch tape,

In the quiet hum of my staticky purple stereo,

I was wanted.

Mom grew worried that I would become a hoarder

Value my possessions like an eldric dragon guarding her treasures

That she sat me in front of a screen and scared me into submission.

She was partly right

But she couldn’t seem to see that these possessions, these treasures, were the very things keeping me alive

Because books and colored pencils and scotch tape can’t force you away

But fathers and sisters can

I was six

When you decided that my voice grew too loud

That my mind grew too sharp

That I had grown

Too much.

Six,

When you decided it would be easier to starve the love out of me,

Than to remember you ever loved that mess of a child in the first place

Because I was a mess

Just as Monet is nothing more than a cluster of dots

And Mozart just black ink on a page

Nothing makes sense if you refuse to see it

And now

After years of starving, and loneliness,

Years of whittling my spirit down from a great redwood

To the very colored pencils I learned how to break

You expect me to relish in your pride?

“Look at who I have solved! Look at how she does nothing but work, create, and breathe! I have perfected the imperfect! Tamed the untamable!”

No!

You do not get to claim this person as your own!

While I am proud of who I am

I am not proud of how I became this

Shedding my past self was an act of survival!

Learning that in order to be loved I needed to be silent!

I loved you!

For years, I loved you more than I could ever love myself

I trusted you, looked up to you, I would have died for you

And yet,

I was never enough.

You said I was annoying.

As if that gave you an excuse to shove your daughter away

nothing more than chalk dust after a night of rain

But in pushing me away,

You forgot one thing.

I was made to be art.

Made to wrestle with the stars and sing with the moon

You muzzled me with lack of love

And thought you created something beautiful

But I will never be beautiful

You have simply fueled my fury,

And given me the very tools to take back my voice

Do not tell me you are proud of me,

Until you are ready to tell that to my six year old self

Because her and I,

I have said my sorry.

And she is ready to teach me how to be Loud again.