This Morning I Was Reading

This morning I was reading poetry. My mind kept wandering down a path of regret and here is what I was thinking:

All those poems gone, I wrote for years, through high school and beyond into my 20’s and I littered notebooks with all the screaming sorrow and confusion and isolation that filled me until I exploded, or rather imploded, and began again as an empty vessel. Now I know my writing was good, like my drawings, but all of it, the drawings and the writings, I kept in secret shame just as I did my life. One day I got married and the next day (well almost…6 months later) divorced and that dark, storm cloud of a man destroyed all the pieces of paper...the spiral bound, loose leaf, bright white, stationary...that told the tale of my prior existence, the story of a girl who wasn’t me, a girl who was only a figment of a life I left rotting in a dank basement because it wouldn’t burn and all attempts to drown it failed because it could swim very well. It did bleed, but not enough to kill it. I tried slow annihilation but it finally just had to get lost, somewhere, like the poems and pencils and pieces of a person. I hope it leaves me alone.