There is one thing you taught me from a young age,
To look past mistakes to see the people that are hurting.

You  built this house, your temple,
On an unconditional type of love.
Growing up with you was like walking through libraries of people with stories to tell.
And you, painting mosaics of understanding around me.
Mother.
Always crafting the world beneath your hands,
Like Gippedo in his workshop
Breathing life into things people never gave a chance to.
Mother swam in oceans of empathy.
Shedding tears for quiet strangers that passed her by.
They say after two years of doing meth you kill the part of your brain that allows you to feel empathy.
Is this true Mother?
There are many things I’ve seen destroyed in this life,
But your empathy is the one I can’t come to terms with.
20 years of this addiction don’t blame me for this rage that’s festering inside me.
Drowning me. Consuming me.
You set out to destroy the world beneath you.
A hammer hitting the pavement
You wanted to burn this house down
But every time you reached for the hammer,
It turned to glass inside your withered hands.
And as you flicked your lighter to burn this once temple of a family,
You warmed the crystal within your glass.
Crystal.
Your new love
Filling you with promises of a new life.
Then as a young child, you showed me what death was.
But this death had a voice,
And walked and breathed the air as I.
This death was a soul being ripped from God’s angel
This death left you with an empty body
A body I could know no longer.
Your cheeks hollow like your eyes could shake from echos
Dissipating like ashes.
A temple turned war zone.
I can still hear your voice thundering through the hallways
Police flooding in like soldiers.
You broke beneath them
Carrying out the fragments of you.
Your eyes like faucets.
Pure terror.
The world stood still.
And I saw it.
I saw you.
I saw the young girl who cried out to her mother when bulimia was eating her away.
I saw the little girl who hid in her closet from the alcohol that poisoned her home.
I saw the girl that wanted nothing more in the world than to be loved.
And I saw that I had let you down.
I was blind.
I wish I could take away all the experiences that have hurt you
I wish I could take away all your pain
I wish I could stick the ashes of you back together
I know I was blind to your pain, but I hope one day you can see mine
Like I said, you built our house on an unconditional type of love