37 Things I Keep to Myself

Content Warning: This poem contains references to disordered eating, passive suicidality, mental health struggles, and cancer.

I still remember my sixteenth birthday,
the tiara I wore to school
like a small bright prayer,
like maybe someone would notice
I was alive.
No one said happy birthday.
A room full of people
can teach a girl what disappearance feels like
while looking directly at her.

I can hold a grudge
like rot in the walls,
like winter in a field.
Long after the damage looks clean.
Some of them are so old
I do not even remember
what first lit the match,
only that the smoke stayed.

How few calories I eat.
The ugliness of atypical anorexia.
Food collapsing quietly in the fridge.
Silverware growing mold in the dishwasher
because I do not eat enough
to justify running it.
The terrible sweetness
of losing five pounds
since the last photo I posted,
the worse sweetness
of being praised for it.
How easily the world mistakes
vanishing
for bloom.

That sometimes I wish
I had never been prescribed Xanax.

That I look at non-nursing jobs
the way trapped things study exits,
like something half-domesticated
testing the collar,
wondering when it will finally
chew through the leash.

That sometimes I wish
I could take my mother’s cancer
like a coat from her shoulders.

Regret has followed me for years
in the sensible voices of people saying
save for a house,
save for later,
save yourself,
and my life answering back
too late.

I live with passive suicidality
the way some people live
beside train tracks.
I am not going to do it.
I know that.
But the thoughts arrive anyway,
loud and scheduled,
and no one wants to hear
how much of your life
is arranged around endurance.

I’ll never forgive you
for the time I wanted
to celebrate surviving myself
and you fed that tenderness
to the algorithm.

I left you my number
because our talks mattered to me.
It still hurts
that you never used it.
Months later,
the silence still feels chosen.

I need to come home
and get healthy.
That terrifies me.
I miss being strong enough to box.

Sometimes I think my dog
deserves someone better than me,
which is stupid, I know,
because dogs do not keep
moral inventories
of the people they love.

I am mourning the years
I spent as a prison nurse
because the trauma I carried so professionally
has finally caught up,
set down its bags,
and moved in.

I could entertain myself for hours,
reading, writing,
building whole private countries
out of language,
but sometimes I still wish
for a wife to come home to,
another pulse in the kitchen,
someone to witness
the ordinary parts of me.

I know I will never lose
my devotion to vulnerable people,
even if I stop doing it as a nurse.
I hate being this sensitive.
I hate that there is no off switch.
More often than not
I feel misfiled by the world.

I used to speak more openly
about my mental health.
This year I have gone quieter,
as if silence itself
might keep me from spilling over.

I will never forgive you
for questioning whether I was fit to practice
when you wrote me up.
Some humiliations do not pass.
They sediment.

People get upset when I’m late
and sometimes what I cannot say
is that getting out of bed
can feel like dragging a body
from a wreck
when the body is also yours.

I tell my colleagues
we cannot measure our worth
by patient outcomes
because I have to tell myself that
every single day.
Because I cry about it often.
Because sometimes nursing
feels like loving people
with your hands tied behind your back.

I believe in the butterfly effect
so deeply
it feels almost religious.
There are moments in my life
I would return to
with a crowbar.
Just crack them open.
Just change one sentence,
one doorway,
one yes,
one no.
I am terrified of karma.
Terrified the universe
keeps receipts.

I really wish
you had used my number
just once.
The last day I saw you
I circled back multiple times,
orbiting my own goodbye,
too scared to say it plainly.

Sometimes I want
to sell everything I own,
put my dog in the car,
drive across the country,
and let the road decide
who I become
when no one is looking.

I am exhausted
from trying to be the perfect nurse.
I am afraid every day
of making a mistake.
Fourteen years
of near-constant fear
has made my nervous system
a chapel full of alarms.

My mother has never been proud
of my academic achievements
the way she is my sister’s.
Maybe because mine came naturally.
Maybe because ease
is never as legible as struggle.
I just want someone
to be palpably,
gut-wrenchingly proud of me.
I want to be loved
like a revelation,
not a competency.

I think I knew
I was in love with my ex
when she saw me without makeup
and started fussing
over the freckles
on the bridge of my nose
like they were something rare
and worth protecting.
I just want someone
who loves the version of me
that is not forever bracing,
not forever performing,
not forever trying
to get everything right
all the time.

I miss Geekbars,
but I think I have enough problems.

Sometimes I think
all of this could be solved
by going to Joshua Tree
and screaming into the abyss
until something ancient
finally answers back.

The last time I went to Joshua Tree
to go out of my mind,
I came back a lesbian.

Not healed.
Not saved.
But translated.