the city that isn't mine

if I were to be blunt

I’d confess I moved to another state

without telling him.

—

if I were to be brave

I’d have confessed it

when my cousin said

he was coincidentally

moving to the same city

—

how different might my life have been

if we forged that connection

two souls, two families, kept apart

by one father’s paranoid ways

—

nine years later,

they are my family now

and he is not.

but could I have learned

what familial love was

a decade sooner?

—

if I were less afraid

I’d have admitted it

after I moved back, still alive

after surviving the city

he always said would surely kill me.

—

if I were less like him

I’d have been truthful

rather than proving myself the liar

I’ve always been.

—

the liar

he first taught me

how to be.

“Don’t tell them you’re homeschooled.

They won’t understand.”

—

darling father,

They would have understood.

They would have.

in all the precise ways you didn’t want them to.

—