I wonder if you wish for a different daughter than me.
And I’m not sure I want to hear the answer.
I can still feel the silence of it echoing through my childhood, you know.
The way it sat at the dinner table, louder than your voice ever was.
The way it filled the spaces between us, thick like tar,
gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth
every time I wanted to ask “do you even like me?”
You rarely hit me.
But the things you didn’t say left darker bruises in places no one checks nor sees.
Your neglect was an artist.
It hollowed me out slowly,
picked apart my softness with surgical cruelty.
Left my heart like a carcass drying in the sun,
unattended, decaying, yet still somehow alive.
Do you remember the day I bled through my school uniform?
Of course not.
You only remember the stain I left on the car seat,
not the way I sat in it for hours before I told anyone,
too ashamed to even exist.
Being your daughter meant apologising for everything:
for crying even when I was wronged,
for laughing at the wrong time,
for needing too much, not even wanting.
I learned early that love was rationed,
measured out by how well I stayed invisible and docile.
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I swallowed so much of myself to survive,
I don’t even know what parts of me were real.
What parts of me are left?
Maybe I was kind.
Maybe I was angry.
Maybe I just wanted someone to look at me
like I wasn’t a burden they never asked for.
I have been carrying this body like a graveyard,
every bone a tombstone for the versions of me that tried.
And when people ask why I’m so reluctant to go home,
I want to say:
because home is where I first learned to hate myself.
I wasn’t the right daughter.
I wasn’t the right sister.
I wasn’t right.
And I have spent my entire life
trying to scrub the wrongness out of my skin
until it bled under my fingernails.
But no matter how much I wash,
you are still there,
always there,
like something rotting in my marrow.
