Forests

There is still a voice that remains as an echo from my childhood and I hear it every now and then and

it reminds me of a time when everything was as it is now but unspoken

A time when I was not yet poisoned by the cancer that had taken root deep inside my being and

coiled it's long tendrils around my veins like the vines of some ancient malicious plant that is just
trying to survive but in order to do so it must suck the life from great living things and force them to
crumble and become compost so that new great things can grow and be strangled and become compost 

We call this process life

And we are all vines

And we are all great living things

And the voices from our pasts will never leave us as we grow and continue to try to survive 

We will remember the wooden floorboards and how they smelled of fresh stain when we endured

our first instance of cruelty and we will remember how beautiful the sun shone down on us when we

were first abused and we will remember the cologne and the perfume and how our finger nails felt like

they would fall out like leaves from a tree that was experiencing the encroachment of malicious vines 

And we are that tree

To be chopped down to provide shelter and warmth for other people and our ashes to be thrown away

and discarded like we were never living beings who sacrificed for the existence of others

And we are vines wrapping around other living things and sucking the life out of them as an act of

desperation so that maybe our ashes wouldn't be discarded and we wouldn't be forgotten but in the

end all things die

So we learn to live with those voices and we learn to cope with the blood stains on the carpets of our

mind because we are human and we fight to try to stay alive we try to fight to stay sane and stay sober

and sometimes we lose that fight and sometimes we break down and cry and sometimes needles

and burnt spoons are the only things that make us feel alive

No soul is perfect no soul is pure 

We do what we can in this vast empty space left in our skulls that was crafted by our abusers so they

could sleep in our heads and pop out at the most inconvenient of times 

We try to forge something new out of the old 

Something positive from the negative

We chop down our vines and force their stranglehold into the darkness so that we can continue to

grow closer to the sun in the sky that will one day consume our solar system but today gives us life

We find other great living things and form forests of people to keep the vines at bay

And sometimes those forests are littered with blades and condoms and other times the forest floor is

a sea of beer bottles and cheap liquor but at the end of the day we are all standing strong together to

work past the finger shaped bruises on our souls and excel beyond the hot breath of hatred on our

necks

Every single tree will eventually fall and become food for the worms and fungus that rise up from

our needles and condoms and bottles and books and every single tree will wilt and shed all its leaves

at some point

Failure isn't the end

It is only a stop along our path to coping 

Maybe one day we can see the sun without remembering the smell of alcohol on the breath of our

abusers

For today 

I'm just happy to be alive