Opaque Skin and a Paintbrush

There are days I wake up with opaque skin

Crystal clear, but no one can see inside

They say, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

As if you could truly know the rose without knowing the shape of it's thorns

The thought of never being known makes my teeth ache like chewing on ice

The meticulous and mechanical mashing of thoughts cold to the bone

Thinking mostly about how the people in my life carry paint with them

Their limited view point always paints me into different facets of who I am

Gifted student, Idiot friend, Under-prepared, Over-invested

Most of the time they purposely leave out a few colors

Red hot anger of the shattered ceramic bowl thrown at my father

Hazy grey undertones of the panic attacks and the I am safe mantra

Peachy forced optimism of the blank-eyed stares of false friends

A splash of blue, purple, pink of love poems never to be heard aloud

And the empty spaces of how the people I value mock my life's story

Unintentionally, because they've never bothered to read the pages

I send them all out to sea in a Bridge to Terabithia style

Globs of paint sailing out along a riverbank heading anywhere

Little by little, in the spaces between conversations

They travel to places they thought they would never see

And marvel at the possibility of being picked up along the shore

By an artist who is willing to paint a landscape with my story

And doesn't try to polish it down to make it manageable and pretty

They just open the window for me and allow the sunlight to stream in

The unapologetic spectrum of light is enough to keep us warm