And We Live

What if how we get to heaven is how we treat our mothers but we are the ones who never treat them well enough?

And we live knowing there is no heaven waiting for us.

What if the ones we love leave us and take our home and peace, and pieces with them but give us a darkness we become?

And we live fighting a war inside of us every day.

What if the ones who stay drink from our well of sorrows hoping to fix us but instead drown in our brokenness?

And we live blaming ourselves for not being enough for them too.

What if the worst of us feign kindness and then stab us from where there are no walls?

And we live trying to save us from ourselves and them.

What if we cry and there is no God to hear our suffering?

And we live hoping we will be proven wrong but the silence is deafening.

What if how we get better is how we are with ourselves when we are alone?

And we live becoming a version of us our mothers would’ve been proud to call their own flesh.

And then after all of this living, we die believing we mattered for a brief moment in time to someone long enough to be remembered.