Tangerine

A poem. We all start reckless with trust. This is about what happens after.

Photo by David Mile

There’s an age when you’ll talk to anyone.
You don’t know yet
about people who don’t want
to hear about your favorite color
or the weird bump on your knee,
the one that doesn’t hurt but looks like a mushed tangerine.
You open your mouth
and the world falls out of you,
because why wouldn’t it?
Why wouldn’t everyone want to know?

Then someone says
not now
or be quiet
or makes you feel so small,
like you’re an exhausting thing to deal with,
and the door closes…
a door you didn’t know was a door.

So you learn to check first.
To rehearse the sentence in your head
and watch their face before you’ve even said it.
To ask yourself whether the thing you want to say
is worth the risk of being too much,
of wanting too loudly.

By ten you’re careful.
By twenty you’re strategic.
By thirty-five you sit across from someone you love
and never say the real thing,
the dumb thing,
the hungry thing,
the thing that might make them leave.

And the loss is so slow
you don’t feel it happen.
Until you wake up one day
unable to remember
what it felt like
to love someone
before you learned
they could hurt you.

We all start the same way,
reckless, stupid with trust,
telling any stranger about the tangerine lump on our knee.
And we all end up here,
wanting,
careful,
forgetting we ever knew
how to open our mouths
and let the world fall out.

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Thanks for reading!

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