Weight

She is made from wait,
weight on her shoulders,
whilst she waits for someone to hold her
anywhere but down.
Down is all she has known,
all she has grown up in,
so now, she is stuck in the idea that to be loved,
is to be lied to,
and as much as she tries to not believe it,
when someone says I love you, she freezes.
She’d say, “You remind me of my father.”
He used to tell tall tales on her skin that he loved her.
But only when mother wasn’t in.
any other time, it was silence.
And now she has a world’s worth of weight
in her chest.
Begging to be anything,
anything but this.
She would say it was torture,
if she needed to speak but
the translucency of her skin
made it all too apparent,
that a parent had let himself in,
to a bedroom or kitchen,
a bathroom insisting
That secrets are worth keeping.
So, she would keep it.
For all of her years.