A Birthday Card

If it would bring you peace

I hope you forget about me

If it would bring you stillness

I hope you forget about us

All of us

Of all the hard work I've seen you do

I've never seen anyone work harder to leave

So if it would bring you reprieve

I hope you find a place where you can go

That's far enough away

I hope there's a pathway, so long, so distant, so plentiful with something else (whatever you need)

That it completely

Eclipses

Erases

Washes away

What you desperately, willfully abandoned

So thoroughly

That upon reflection

It never happened

As fate would have it, 6 years into your escape, our paths would cross

I saw in your eyes our silhouettes, permanently burned into ground zero of your psyche

An unfortunate consequence of the atom bomb of your absence

But your neglect was...

Peculiar

You stayed just close enough to watch

Beyond reach

Just close enough to see us suffer and panic in the face of annihilation

Just close enough

To watch it all from safety

That spectacle came at a cost that you lack the shame to fathom

Is your ego satiated?

How did our Suffering taste?

I often contemplate my inheritance

That volatile cocktail of emotional abuse and Empowerment

Of Wit and Fury

That dizzying Alchemy of Heavenly Sincerity and Demonic Manipulation

Never once did you allow me to assume the game of existence was anything like checkers

I was 19 when I realized I was a pawn in your game

Loyal

Expendable

Vulnerable

Deluded

Apt for Sacrifice

I realized

On the altar

My chest torn open

I realized

When I saw my beating heart for the first time in hands I once called Home

That you don't see people, you see pieces.

You don't see faces, you see sides

Your last words to me were

"I see your moves."

Do you?

What do you see now?

I'll tell you what I see.

I see a King trapped in the last square of the last row of his Kingdom

I see a Pawn standing defiantly in front of him

I see a Rook far, far behind, but in line

A symbol of all of the officers, the people you discarded

In your cowardice

In your pain

I see

And

I feel

The rust on your crooked, broken crown

The ashes of the bridges burned rain down around us

I gaze deep into your eyes reflecting the shame and pain that now hungers for the remaining years of your life, the remaining joy in your life

And if it would bring you peace

I'd clear the board and walk away

But that's not how this works, is it?

Happy Birthday.