the angry daughter…🌷🤍 #originalpoem #spokenpoetry #poetrytok

I was raised in a house that burned so slowly no one called it a fire. Anger was an explosive, it was carbon monoxide, you don't see it, you don't smell it, you just grow up dizzy and think that it's normal. My parents told me this was love, and I believed them, because I had nothing else to compare it to. I swear I'd never become it, I'd never become the things I feared the most. I was sick sitting on the floor of my pink bedroom, making promises to God like he hadn't already met my bloodline. I promised I'd never become my parents, like a promise could outgrow the house it was made in. I said I'd be softer, kind or different, but anger is a secondhand habit. It clings to your clothes, settles into your lungs, it's smoke you didn't choose to inhale, but still have to cough up. No matter how many windows I open, they're still smoking me. It's in my last name and my blood and every little crevice of my bones. My therapist has always taught me how to deal with anger when you're on the receiving end of it, but not what to do when you become it. One day you wake up and look in the mirror, but it's your father's eyes wearing your face and then you're screaming at someone you love for no given reason. And your voice sounds a little bit older now and suddenly it's not your voice at all, it's his. It comes out of you so naturally, it terrifies you like muscle memory, like fate, something always destined to find you. You watch their face fall and something inside you nose you've seen this before, from the other side of your room, from the other side of your childhood. That's when it hits you, this wasn't just learned. It was passed down, folded into your DNA. The worst part isn't becoming him. It's realizing how patient anger can be when it knows it belongs to you. Some days I still believe this is my fate, that one day I'll burn exactly the way they did. I'll mistake the anger for comfort and call it love. I spent my whole life afraid of fire, but it turns out this is what I call home.