Ugly Masks (Poem)

I am angry

I am still angry, angry for you, Sweetie

I still lay wide awake at night, playing your confession in my head

Wondering how far I would have gone just to protect you…

Your safety isn’t something I chose

My divine gave me no choice in the matter

You were born and my heart wanted nothing but your smile

That night was the ugly proof that I had failed, and not just you from back then

But all of you

From then it’s been a continuous spiral to make up for lost time and dignity

Eirene, I am mad to what had to be done to you

I walk every day to witness how you move on

To grab each piece like sea shells on the shore of life

Your back bent to not miss any

And your eyes wide open to not lose sight of what you have lost

You screamed that night to halt a bunch of animals from doing to you,

What should never be done to any woman

I applaud your strength to come home and smile

You should have blamed me, I had a face

My name was yours to insult

I would have taken it and embraced it, nursed it like the elder I am to you

I look to you every day, walking like Atlas

Forever condemned to shoulder a world too big for you

I hold out my arms every day to help you carry on

I wonder? Is that your way to keep that control?

That stance of an old warrior keeping watch

Am I supposed to do something? Or just let you be

Is that the help you need? Or the silence you crave

So many unspoken words between us, for we know we can’t take them back

The unseen scars from the unseen faces, did we all become that to you?

Gruesome masks to hide what it is still beautiful with the world.

It’s my letter to you, to be brave on paper

For I can’t be to your face

To print out that I was never that unfortunate

Life smiled at me while It made faces to you

Handpicked you to walk a path so that many will never have to

Such ugly blisters, and now your second skin

I cry for you, for you can’t afford to. For you became the watchman

To protect the innocence of those that can only see the day.

MODEL: Keza Fiona

TO ALL VICTIMS OF RAPE, YOU DON'T HAVE TO HOLD THAT WEIGHT ALONE.

Figures (POEM)

Do we all have it figured out?

Is there truly a snippet of a moment when all fall into place?

When all the pieces finally take form

Or is life a thief in the night

Adorned with a mask to come rob you of all certainty?

Or a master meant to snatch away that confidence?

So many questions to take away my faith

That I will never have lean on anything

Is it from a jealous God or from my prideful heart?

My victories stretch out like a big canvas

My mind holding that brush, for a moment it feels like I have it all

Everything is where it should be, I am finally who I should be

That dance I could never learn

Those steps that could never sync with my reflexes

I hate that I yearn for more, something outside of all contexts

For it takes those small pleasures of life away

And I am left to just be…

My sentences never end

Lonely nights came to seal that reality in me

I am tired that my future is tied to what I feel I will never have

I despise those pillars that were never strong enough to hold me

I loathe myself for that cycling mistakes of leaning on

For its never for long

Is that what’s been decided to be enough for me?

I stand confused and tortured

For I gave lived and held on

A coward I became to never toss that coin

For on the other side is engraved with death and moments that end

What do I do now?

To stand still and just be

To reject all of what pulled me through

Will that put an end to that torment that I AM?

To reject that old wisdom that I have but to become.

I want to spit in the face of that old sage

And shout that I have had enough

I am human and broken

Forever meant to be a casualty ‘

Of a war I can never win

and an identity I can never escape.

Model: Keza Fiona

Let’s Talk About Trauma and Destigmatizes it

As a growing child I experienced and felt things, and many times I wished I had names to be able to address whatever emotional feelings I felt at the moment. And like all many people in my generation when we turned to our parents, they either brushed it off or attributed it to superstitious reasons.

As a grown-up woman, I sometimes believe that things would have been different if I knew from the youngest of age that it’s okay to feel what I felt. To have the assurance to let my emotions run their course. As someone who turned to books for answers and when I was old enough to own a phone, LOL. I would download every psychological book I could find in hopes to understand.

I discovered a couple days ago that a close friend of mine suffered from PTSD, she grew up with an alcoholic-abusive father, she always had a problem with any excessive sound, from banging of a door to a scream to a speaker with volume that hits to fifty, such sounds seem to trigger traumatic memories that hadn’t been voiced in years and she would go into hyperventilating state in seconds. I know that many of the reasons why her mental state worsened was that she never knew that such events can mark an individual more than they can believe or are aware of.

The mentality we all grew up with, is that certain feelings are for the privileged. And that is one of things that drives me to advocate for mental health, we all hurt and we all should be given that space to express and heal it. I have been reading a book called “The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Ven der Kolk” and it depicts how the brain expresses trauma and how our emotions and habits keeps the unseen scars, until our identity embraces It as part of its own.

One thing of what the author mentioned that hit me and stayed with me is: “After trauma, the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don’t.” that simple statement explained my whole life in a single phrase, how I was naturally pushed to people with whom I had the same traumatic experiences or even simply failures.

The cycles that surround our lives unseen and yet they weave events that become our lives, healing isn’t just about forgiving, crying about something or receiving therapy, it’s about forging a new identity, it’s a chance for us to decide who we want to become and have say in it.

Model: @kezafiona