Rainbows

Rainbows

Sometimes when I look at me

I see you.

I see blue eyes flash in my honey brown

I see pain where I never saw it before.

I see your hands on my shoulders

brushing back my silk hair, long and heavy.

I hear you laugh

as my tears hit the porcelain.

Refracting sunlight- a million rainbows

A million memories.

My heart was an August afternoon

the day we met.

Ripe, overflowing,

bearing fruits too plump to pick,

that you bit into,

and I watched, frozen, as the juice ran down your chin.

I was a lush garden, dripping in morning dew,

that you found so pleasant to walk among.

I was the cool waters of a trickling stream,

and your river had stopped running long ago.

So you drank and drank until I was dry.

And when I left I was a husk of a girl,

bound on a plane to a place I’d never been,

bruised and weak and hopeful.

I had been stripped bare,

you tore out every diamond I contained;

and you wore them around your chest as I walked away.

I was a child,

and you were many years

but hardly any wisdom older.

I was naive enough

to believe in such a bitter, angry man.

and I left to go and heal

with only money in my hand.

I ran as though I was a convict,

that had finally broken free.

I curled up in sweet Vienna

with all the pieces left of me.

And I felt the music then

moving gently through me,

where it poured into my empty beating heart

and filled the cracks in the walls,

beating along with it,

and I breathed a whole breath

for the first time in three hundred days.

Something moved that night,

and wiped the dirt off of her knees,

fixed her hair, put on red lipstick,

and in the morning flew to Greece.

And I stayed.

For three weeks, I stayed.

Hidden at the edge of the earth,

where the pink skies kissed the mountains every morning.

Where the wind blew through the trees

so forcefully that I never noticed the pain being stripped away.

And I sang for the people

for the first time without fear constricting around my throat,

because I told myself this:

I have been humiliated,

I have been manipulated,

I have had many, many men pour their pain inside of me.

I have made my peace with life and with death,

And I am still here.

So I sang.

I sang, and I let the stars pour through my fingers,

I let the sun rest on my tongue,

I sang to all the lonely people who were so afraid of love.

To the happy people and the broken people,

to the ones who were not people at all

but reflections of a thousand feelings they had never parted with.

Like the rainbows in my bathroom,

they bounced and glittered,

and were never still.

Maybe,

that was you.

I laughed and I cried,

and old parts of me died,

and when I left Greece

I was a new woman inside.

In Spain I ate like royalty,

In Portugal I fell in love,

With a boy who knew no English

But still believed in what I was.

I came home one day in August,

I hugged my mother,

and I saw myself in the bathroom mirror.

I thought of the last time I’d seen you.

It had seemed that the diamonds you stole

still sat on your chest,

but grew heavier with each passing day.

You looked tired.

I stared at the woman who stared back.

She glowed, she carried the sun

In the honey brown freckles on her nose.

She was strong,

She held wisdom between the cracks in her armour.

I smiled as a little rainbow ran down my cheek,

Glinting in the afternoon light.

Outside, a little bird sang,

And I sang with her.