sunflowers
I spent long hours of my childhood making up fantasies.
pretending to be asleep, so that I can be left alone with my daydreams.
I built different worlds with different versions of me
With different lovers and different families.
In one world, we start out as two strangers on a train.
Both made eye contact but both too nervous to say hello.
There’s only one more stop before I get off,
but you don’t know.
Will I ever see you again?
Our fate is chosen in the second he decides to follow me, stops me, says to me, “hi.
I don’t know who you are but I think I saw your soul in your eyes,
and they look like you may have seen mine.”
In this world I am learning how to turn old lovers into lessons.
In another fantasy, I’m falling in love with a pirate.
I am a locked prisoner of my father’s ship and you’ve promised to do one last crime.
Our secret love burns the sheets at night.
No girl has ever made your stay this long.
Has ever made you yell the ocean’s secrets.
You save her from her storms, from her father, from the dangers of sea.
But that’s the problem-
You see, every story is about how happy she feels when she falls in love.
What the man says to her.
How the man fucks her.
Every story is about the man.
Why can’t it be about her?
Be about how she only writes when she needs to breathe.
How she meditates in the silence of her bathtub.
How she promises to teach her daughter how to grow sunflowers in her back pockets.
How to pleasure herself in a hot shower.
How to be self-sustaining.
How to connect with her feminine energy and call upon Mother Nature for advice on how to stay warm and full and magical all by herself.
Why can’t I save myself?
Why am I waiting for someone to save me?
- by B
