I am not my mother’s child, I am my father’s creation

Iam not my mother’s child, I am my father’s creation. I was carefully molded to hold the weight of his torment in my heart. The manifestations of his so-called “love” now fit snug in my chest cavity, and I can’t ever seem to ever dig them out. It creeps up my throat to my head and I often fear it’ll just consume me entirely.

Now the broken sense of love I feel for others tends to pry open my ribcage and crack at my bones, I have no choice but to fall apart at their feet and desperately pray for their for their love and admiration, and maybe a sliver of respect, because I’m nothing without a keeper.

But everytime they seem to turn on their heel after looking down upon my crumpled body and the entrails of my mind that I've spilled out for them to critique and alter into something desirable, because I know I’m generally not.

I’ll use the last bit of strength in my body to tear myself apart, staring into the now vacant vacuum

that I call Me, wondering why I wasn’t enough. Throughout that process, the realization that I have to be the one to build myself back up again slowly seeps in.

So I’ll squeeze my own hand and I’ll hold my own hair, I’ll dry my own tears and rock my weak body back and forth.

I may have been swallowed up by this void that they blame on “trauma” or “a chemical imbalance” but I swallowed it up in return.

I’ve guzzled down every night alone in my room with all the lights o , staring aimlessly into the popcorn texture of my ceiling, feeling salty droplets roll down my cheeks into the corners of my mouth.

Editor’s Note: Schuler’s entry was submitted as a spoken word video, which can be viewed in full online at rappnews.link/ qga