Heirloom
I am detached, estranged even, from where I come from, yet I carry many of the same burdens that my ancestors did. This weight lives in my body dictating how I accesses memories and how I process the present moment. The lens through which I look at the world is colored by those around me who have helped shape it.
The relationships I’ve had or haven’t had with my family in their periods of ebb and flow have seeped into how I search for romantic partners and how I recoil from being parented. The tension between my desire for independence and yearning for someone to deeply care for me often manifest with a chasm between them, and these innate parts of me seem to be in need of reconciliation. As I search, this dissonance in me teeter-totters in unbalance. Sorting through these emotional artifacts brings to light heirlooms that I do not have to accept, things that I do not necessarily have to pass on. However, this does not mean that the life they have created is easily resolved, that the passing of time is not continuously marked by their residue in ways that I am always rediscovering.