When all of my trust was burned,
I remained with a single tear
Balanced precariously at the corner of my eye.
And days turned to nights,
Weeks to months as I lay still, fighting not to cry,
Balancing the tear,
Unblinking, because I wanted it to dry
Right there.
I didn’t want it to fall
And sizzle and scald like lava,
No, I wanted it to die-
That single tear that represented hope and youthful friendship at the corner of my eye.
I felt like I would drown in salt baths if I let myself cry,
So I forced myself to stare, to hold that tear right there,
Peeling my eyelids open, and open, and open until...
The tear,
It didn’t just die,
It boiled at the corner of my eye.
It burned away like acid at the veil of my eye.
It burned away every last drop in my tear ducts so that now I cannot cry.
All of this from the one tear, that I saved as I lay on a hospital bed fighting night after night not to cry.
And at first I thought it a blessing,
This new, unblinking eye,
But then I wished I could turn it off.
I wished I could stop the suspicion that flowed from my eye.
I wished that I didn’t have to question everyone’s intention.
And every time I rejected a friend, I wished that I could explain
That it would never be the same
Between me and anyone
Because what’s done is done,
The veil is gone,
And because, since I’ve been ushered into the beyond, I have come back,
But my eye
Can see what lies
Beyond skeleton smiles.
Now, I see bare teeth like whitened bones,
Broken confidences and rumors running wild.
I see blackened claws of friendship, eager to rip at flesh still alive.
I see that I walk among wolves.
And sometimes I hide,
Sometimes, I don a fur cloak and grimace, and snarl and smile
As I die inside
Cowering under the glare of my very own eye
Which sees everything, except it cannot see the difference between real and fake, the truth and a lie-
My unblinking, malfunctioning eye.
I should have blinked when I had the chance.
I should have allowed myself to cry.
I shouldn't have held onto that tear at the corner of my eye,
The tear left to dry,
Its presence now a tattoo that says
Here died...
My faith in anything that exists outside of myself.
Because now, with clarity of hindsight
I think
That maybe, if I had blinked,
I would have protected my eye.
My Influence
My friends, I love literature, always did. And the older I get, the more I can appreciate the value of reading as a child.
Growing up, Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe were among my favorite authors. And sometimes when my siblings and peers were out and about, playing games of hide and seek or cricket or on some adventure or another, I enjoyed nothing better than curling up beneath the sheets and navigating my way through Dickens' complex sentences or enjoying the thrill of one of Poe's macabre tales. This, to me, was paradise.
Today, it's interesting sometimes when I find echoes of my childhood reading in my writing, particularly when I don't intend for it to be there.
For example, I wrote this poem, The Tear, back in 2020 to address the experience of growing out of trauma by suppressing one's emotions, and then becoming brittle, hard, and socially handicapped.
When I wrote the poem I was not thinking about any story that I read when I was young. Yet, sometimes one needs only to zoom out for a better perspective.
After writing this poem in 2020, I didn't really do much with it. Today though, I read it again, this time out loud, and in doing so, I was reminded of the vulture-like eye in Edgar Allan Poe's story, The Tell Tale Heart. Go figure, right?
Homage
Anyways, I am sharing this poem with you today because recently I heard about a former employer of mine who had passed away in what appears to be, at the very least, lonely circumstances. I don't think it would be appropriate to name the individual, however I'd say this. She hadn't been seen for some time, a report was made, the law went into her apartment, and she was found. She had transitioned, hopefully peacefully. That's it, in a nutshell.
And so, I heard the story, and though the lady and I weren't friends, to be clear, she was simply an employer that I had spent less than three months working for many years ago, making our connection tenuous at best, I still felt sad, acutely sad. Does that make sense?
See, in our brief interaction, the lady in question had been kind to me. She had offered me employment during a very dark and turbulent period in my life.
My tenure, unfortunately, was short lived though, to be clear, through no fault of my employer. Simply put, I was not yet ready. That said, we knew each other for a brief season and so, when I read of her passing, I remembered the woman who sat across the desk from me many years ago, offering me a job, offering me a salary, offering me another shot at life. And I felt sad.
Though we never spoke after I walked away, I'd wish that she knew that I was grateful and that she was one of the lights in my life that saved me. And that hubris stood in the way of me saying that to her when I had the actual chance.
May she rest in eternal peace.
