Scrapbook Words

By Airea Johnson

I sit here and wonder, I think, I ponder on what to write. What I can share with you, give you this piece of me that you’ll someday forget. My words a silhouette that will one day evaporate…like me.

I hesitate…what if I get it wrong, what if you never understand? What if I confuse you with these emotions that even I can’t even comprehend.

I want to write about my feminism and how fragile men compare me to a Nazi, write about having nothing to my name but a stereotype; my “beat the odds poor-kid success story.” I hold my tongue. Somehow I have forgotten how to speak after her narcissism cut me off for so long. I left Alabama more than 2 years ago and I still talk about the abuse in present tense, sometimes when I see violence on TV I hold my breath or hear shouting I flinch…she doesn’t get to choose when to be a parent after she spent so long burrowing in her rabbit hole of complacency and denial…how can I describe the rabbit hole without inviting you down with me?

How will I successfully express the tender way I carry the love for myself, so deeply like the stitches of a throw-blanket while simultaneously wearing my depression like Ray Bans on my face, looking through shades of grey.. a walking contradiction.

I could talk about the way I thought a toxic relationship was my Disney Princess story; romanticized emotional abuse with a side of “victimized damsel.” How was I not supposed to fall in love with his bird cage hands, when all I ever wanted to do was fly? He warmed his ice cube lies around my furnace heart that I so willingly let him in, the weight of manipulation that was tied around my hollow bones left me crawling back to him every time, I had never related to Atlas more in my life, but the world that I had carried on my shoulders was his.

Someone once asked me why I’m so worried about sharing my words with others and I responded, “No one wants to read art if it’s not pretty.”