Forget me not

They call me a bad asian.

Sometimes I walk up the carpet stairs with my shoes on to get forgotten keys,

each step shooting jolts through my feet as I trample on my heritage for convenience.

You ask me for my favorite flowers and I tell you forget me nots, because despite how

deeply melancholy swallows the light inside its thick gums,

I taste sweet yellow plums and crisp morning air.

Choice.

When you look at me, do you see me or the graveyard of the person I used to be,

inhaling my presence with a hollow chest cavity held up by nostalgia for the past,

each exhale leaving you a bit emptier than the next as you try to fill the sepia toned air with color.

Forget me not, the girl that waves at airplanes even when they can not see her because

she never felt too small to acknowledge something greater than her.

Do not accept the haunting of what could have been by holding your breath. Exhale.

Let her go, but forget me not, for I am still here.

I have learned that sometimes war is quiet.

That war tastes like coming home, feels like fingertips combing through your hair,

saturated in secrets and bleached lies, of settling into arms you know how to fall back into.

The first time war showed up at my doorstep, it came disguised as a math problem.

Solve for x.

I stared at the words, eyes diverting to counting how many blue lines the notebook paper had,

thinking about how readily skin melts beneath warm hands and the echoes of promise,

tracing a circle in the punch holes over and over and over and over.

The question lay unanswered as I turned the sink to a roar,

hot tears clogging sticky pores, a saline solution my body shrunk from

as my skin gave away to the ritual cleansing of not feeling enough to

occupy the dreams of the ones who share the crook of my nose in the mirror.

I returned to the math homework and asked myself,

“What is the problem you are solving for?”

When I could only find myself, I knew war had arrived,

raw on my tongue as it built barricades to conversation,

defense mechanisms made of apologies and bullets aimed to the sky.

I wondered if armies were ever defeated by the question of

What to do when you are at war and do not know which side you are on?

I want to want to stop, but at night it is hardest to know who I am fighting

because I look no different than my shadows, and we question

whether we can exist without each other.

I have learned that love has never meant understanding.

Even with love, I felt looks of distaste in dressing rooms, a bare boned body

picked apart like leftovers that my mother could not help but stare at.

Even with love, when I asked my father whether he thought suicide was selfish,

he said they were not people to look up to when I thought

we looked up to people for how they lived, not how they died.

I could not blame them for something I hoped they would never understand.

But love, even with its misguided directions, love held me tenderly.

Love was the boy who quietly held my hand in a school library, tracing my palms like he was understanding a language only his fingers could if they held mine long enough.

Love was my mother and father sitting me down at the dinner side table when the fever had broken,

anger dissipating from bulging sangria veins and furrowed brows to tell me that

although we spoke different languages, love was always served.

Love was realizing that me and my body were not made of war, but were built to withstand it.

Landmines erupt and I learn to look at fireworks

with an entirely different light.

I learn that we burn to last through the night.

Sometimes war is quiet,

shot from rusty throats on unblemished skin,

marred with lipstick stains and teeth marks.

Sometimes pain is a ghost that leaves a haunting no one believes,

a phantom limb you desperately want people to know exists.

But sometimes bones must break to heal, to learn and relearn the way our

bodies were supposed to hold themselves together.

Rainfall uproots knees to chests but by morning brings worms

crawling from their dirt slumber with aching muscles ready to move on.

I speak not from a place of suffering for the war I have endured,

no longer afraid to buckle beneath the weight of a trigger

because my hands no longer hold on to my body for fear of letting go.

I was the solution to the problem all along, hope unabating,

patiently waiting for me to come home to.

I am home on my own.

So forget me not, the girl who was never afraid to feel small,

arms extending to something far greater than her,

cheeks unabashed for tears she grows from.

Forget me not, for who I was,

and remember me now, for who I am.