Written by Lore Satori

I’ve been thinking. That’s all I’ve had
since spending our combined years
hiding away in the white noise of our mind.
I’ve been thinking for a while now,
been denying you sleep and burdening you
with weighty conclusions like an
overworked beast. And while I safely
bide my time where none can reach me,
birthing ideals and truths I preach so freely,
I refused to see that my peaceful philosophies
have drawn a border between us, and I have
only ever made excuses for you; apologized
for you and the sheer autonomy with which
you carved our planes and valleys.
You were only following orders, though
they were not mine. And I think I hated you
for your single-minded subservience to
biology. But I’ve been thinking, and I think
it’s time I owed you the apology.

I am sorry for being embarrassed of you,
for condemning you to lonely evenings
filled with vodka made salty by
the tears you shed from my hatred of you.
I am sorry for taking advantage of you,
for being the one sadistic artist
who painted you with ragged scars
when you were far too drunk to stop me.

I am sorry for starving you when
you turned to food for comfort,
for planting a foreign ring around your
stomach to force you into a common shape.

I am sorry for my attempted murder
of you with pills and plunges from heights,
and when all else failed, I filled you with
minty smoke with whispered promise of death.

I am sorry for manhandling you
into society’s standards of manliness,
for pinching and pushing and tucking
you away for none other than my sake.

I am sorry for haunting your dreams
and fashioning you into an ideal
born of a collective dream, only
to taunt your reality upon awaking.

I am sorry for colonizing your
ambition, for mocking your decision
to persist in a world unkind to you.
How can I not have sided with you?

But most of all, I am sorry that I hate you still,
and that I can’t tune out the voices of many
who criticize you or take a moment to listen to
those who praise your perceivable beauty.

My neglect of you is unforgivable and shame
runs as deeply through me as it cuts into your
veins with rusty razor blades. But you
keep healing, and I’ve been thinking that
I have nothing worthwhile to teach you.
I’ve been thinking that it wasn’t I who
erected the apartheid separating us two,
but that perhaps it was you. It was you
who, in all your patience, have been waiting
for me to see that we are not opposites. I
think you know that you aren’t wrong, and
that my longing to be rid of you has verified
that the only beast existing among us here is me.
I’ve been thinking and there will, someday, be a treaty.
Just think of that one day, so many somedays from now,
of how formidable we will be.