Buttons

Heartache isn't easy.

When I was three, my grandpa died.

Everyone in my family thinks that I was too little to remember him, but I do.

I remember a salt and pepper mustache on top of a smile that could disarm the terrorists inside of your heart and replace it with democracy and love.

How can you forget the man that taught you that hate was not an option, hate was never an option, hate was the option that you were never supposed to choose, hate was the big red button that released the missile that destroyed the world.

So when he died, I started to look at that big red button a little closer.

It was actually pretty plain looking, for a button. If I didn’t know any better, I would have pressed it by accident. To warn myself, I put a label on it. It read:

"Hate button. Don’t press it." I felt good, knowing that I would never end up pressing it due to that label.

When I was five, I ripped that label clean off.

It was my first day at school, a kid told me that I wasn’t black, I was dirty.

I didn’t know what to say.

I was heartbroken, I was in pain. I went home and stared at that button long and hard, never pressing it. Just staring.

Two days later, my city flooded.

See, the thing about New Orleans is that it’s built like a bowl. So every time it rains, instead of just filtering out, it collects in the center of the city.

Naturally, I picked up that trait.

When we left we could only fill my mom’s car with so many things so we took clothes and medications and papers and pictures and…

Buttons.

We took the one for love and we took the one for hate and I placed them both in my chest side by side next to each other, fire next to ice, dark next to light,

Button next to button.

When I was six, a boy at school destroyed my paper mache project.  I watched him, that bowl inside of me filling up with pain and sadness and despair as he stomped and smashed all over my poor giraffe.

We both got sent to the principal’s office, so the could talk about what happened.

I remember the hushed whispers of the teachers behind closed doors, and how they forgot to close the door and they forgot to whisper.

"I think it was her fault." I was confused, what did I do?

"Of course it's her fault, you know how her kind is!" I never knew what this meant until my seventh birthday.

That was the first time I tried to hurt myself.

I sat there alone in my room past my bed time, past the time it was still okay to be aware of the world in all of it's entirety. I scratched at my skin like it was a lottery ticket hoping that if I scratched hard enough that I would win a prize.

Like beauty.

All I got were the streams of blood that coated my pillow and my sheets and my heart. I stayed up late, scrubbing at the sheets and scrubbing at my eyes because I couldn't stop then flow of self loathing that went along with my arm.

The next morning, my mom walked into my room, and saw the wet sheets and the tears in my eyes and immediately assumed that I had wet the bed. She hugged me and told me that it was okay, that it would get better.

To this day I still don't believe her.

She saw my arm and she asked me what happened. I could hear angels in my head screaming at me, saying that I needed to tell the truth. But I didn't. I couldn't. How could you tell your mom that you smashed your hand on that button, but the only person that you hate is yourself. How do you admit that?

I lied. I said that I had a rash, and that I was scratching in  my sleep. To this day, I still don't think she put two and two together to get the pain I felt in my heart, that I feel in my heart.

When I was 10, I started babysitting my cousins. I'm the oldest, that's still a kid, anyway, so I was left with the responsibility.

I only had to babysit one cousin this time, a little girl. She and I weren't close, because that portion of our family lived in the northeast so I never got to see her as much as I would like. Everyone said that we were the exact same person, and I couldn't see it. We may looked exactly the same and we may talked the exact same way, but we weren't the same person.

I walked into her bedroom expecting to find her reading on her bed, but instead she was sitting there, furiously scratching at her skin like she was trying to win the lottery.

Like she was trying to win a prize.

Now I could see what everyone meant, when they said we were alike. She was me, so many years back.

Before my hand had smashed on that button.

I grabbed her, and hugged her tight. "Sweetie, why are you doing this to yourself?"

A kid at school called her dirty.

I could see her hand reaching for that button. I could see her ready to give up like I gave up, I could see her becoming me in front of my eyes.

But she wasn't dirty. She was pure and clean and nice and sweet and everything that everyone hopes their child would be. She was beautiful, she was like the radiating sun that all of us revolved around. She was was amazing.

"He was wrong," I told her. I ripped that button out of her hands, it wasn't an option, it was never an option for her. I didn't want her to go through what I went though.

I don't want her to have to wait six and a half years before someone came around and rebuild her from the ground up to realize that what they say is not true.

I don't want her to have to pick up the broken fragments of her self confidence and staple them to her heart in an impenetrable cocoon.

I don't want her to fall in love with the right person, for all of the wrong reasons.

I want her to happy.

At school, I want her nickname to be Spongebob because I want her to be just as care free as him.

I want her to realize that life is a fatal disease and that living is your bucket list, and that every person that you meet is just another person in your corner.

I don't want to see the word beautiful carved in her arm as a reminder of what she cannot achieve in her mind.

I don't want her to end up like me.

I want to grow up to be her.

Author's Note

Remember guys, this is a spoken word poem.