This is a poem I wrote in an attempt to discuss two personalities or sides of myself that I posses. I chose my given name and my chosen name, and the rift between. How does my past as the girl my parents know affect my future as the person I want to be? I never knew a name would mean so much, but what if it isn’t just a name?
I cannot write about myself as only two parts of the whole when the reality is so much more than that. I am not only my given name but the person that comes along with that. She is the person I can no longer bear to be, but this new one is who I am not yet.
Her, the girl who gets told she’s just so beautiful, so smart, why doesn’t she have a boyfriend yet? Maya, the girl full of resentment and bitterness, yet remembered so well where she used to reside. The girl with scars upon her wrist, because school was too hard and her parents were too mean, and she can’t understand why she doesn’t want to wear dresses anymore, why her girlfriend only loves her with a sweaty body in the dark, why the memories in her head don’t make sense.
But my wrist holds her scars. My mind holds her memories. How can we be so different if we are so painfully the same? I wish I was the peaceful and forgiving balance between independence and leaning too heavily on the person beside her, the person who can write their thoughts down without the words controlling them. The person I cannot understand, the person I am now, is the girl in between. My past controls me, my future is not compatible with the model I am now.
The girl stuck between the boy and the church with the taste of tears and weed in her mouth will forever haunt me. Haunt me? Haunt her? I am the person stuck between. I am the person between worlds. I am no longer the child full of naïveté and hope, I am no longer the girl crying in her room trying to pull her binder up before her mom sees, and I am not the person I know I can be, because she holds me back. I hold myself back? I am no longer my father’s daughter. I cannot fit into the pegs I have spent my life carving. I cannot fit into the pages I’ve spent my whole life writing. I cannot write. I cannot breath into her lungs and breath out my own air. Because I am not her, and I am not them, and I never knew a name would mean so much. Is it my name at home, my name at school, or the one I call myself inside the walls of my skin?
Who is this?
