I look into a mirror at a face I think is mine,
But tracing back my childhood is a tangled, broken line.
I remember summer mornings in a house beside the sea,
But mum says we lived on land, and looks afraid at me.
I remember climbing up trees and falling from a bough,
Yet there is no matching scar in my reflection now.
Everything before 11 feels so bright,
A painted gallery that keeps me awake at night.
But the details start to flicker like a candle in the dark,
The laughter of a different girl inside a crowded park.
I see her party candles, and I taste her birthday cake,
And I shudder with the terror of a truth I cannot break.
Whose hands are these I look at? Whose choices did I make?
Whose phantom childhood memories was forced for me to take?
Can I trust my memories? Can I trust my brain?
Or am I just a person to carry someone’s pain?
The doctors whispered secrets when they though that I was cold,
A pristine, empty canvas for a story never told.
They took the fading echoes of a girl who passed away,
And stitched them into my brain where they permanently stay.
I feel her terrors, and I feel her sudden tears,
An artificial prisoner of someone else’s fears.
She died before her twelfth birthday, so her timeline ends here,
Leaving me with jagged thoughts and artificial care.
My own life starts at 12 years old, a sudden, blinding light,
A sudden shock of consciousness that woke me in the night.
Her mother came to visit once and stared into my eyes,
Searching for her daughter in my disguise