Inside me live two women,
like two sisters who never learned to share the same room.
The first,
with knees pressed together, with neatly combed hair,
with her voice shrunk in her throat,
with the fear of being “too much,”
“too intense,”
“too alive,”
wants to be loved.
Cleanly. Steadily. Forever.
She wants to be held by the hand in front of the world,
to be told “you’re safe, stay here, stay with me.”
The other,
almost wild,
with blood in her mouth and wind in her hair,
who doesn’t ask for permission, doesn’t stand in line,
doesn’t dim her light for fear of blinding,
wants to be free.
To leave without explanation,
to write until her hands shake,
to burn,
to reinvent herself,
to look in the mirror and say:
“I don’t negotiate myself anymore.”
The first holds me.
The second shatters me.
The first teaches me to stay.
The second whispers that staying can be a form of death.
The first brings me a kind of quiet.
The second brings me a kind of raw truth.
And sometimes, in the middle of the night,
I hear my bones crack,
as if the two women are pulling me in opposite directions,
like a wet sheet forgotten, never hung out in the sun.
There are days when I want to be loved so much
that I would dip my whole voice in honey,
just so I wouldn’t hurt,
just so I would be chosen.
And there are other days
when freedom grows inside me like a mad tree,
breaking my ribs,
filling my chest with leaves,
and I would leave, I would cut, I would write, I would scream,
I would be everything the little girl in me was not allowed to be.
My truth?
I don’t want to choose between them.
I want to make peace with them.
To be loved without being confined.
To be free without hurting.
To be the woman who stays and the woman who leaves,
in the same skin.
Every morning, I set out with two hearts:
one that settles,
and one that flies.
And maybe I don’t have to choose.
Maybe I am whole only when
I draw breath
and feel the two women inside me
finally,
breathing together.