A poem Teal wrote after performing a symbolic ceremony alone where she wrote her father a letter and burned it as an act of closure during the wintertime.
The agonized sea
of parting ways
heaves and cracks against the heart
His smile burns its ways across my grief
As if teasing
As if reminding me of what I have lost
The sound of heartbreak
Rings heavy like a bell underwater
The impact of the echo of it could be my undoing
But here I am
I have not broken under the blow of it
But I want to
The sun is setting
Both inside and out
I am capsized by the sound of my own voice
A plea to the listening sky
A renunciation
Instead of a wanting
I am done wanting
Done wanting for a life I never had
Done wanting from a man who would never give it
And cannot give it
And will never give it
I have written him a letter
I have read it aloud
My voice is nothing against an internal sea in torment.
It amounts to a whisper
But a whisper is still a vow
After perpetual defeat
You have to wonder
If you are powerless because you can’t stop and move on
You have to ask yourself
How much of you was happy while it lasted?
Do you not father me on the destroying sands of this earth because I’m not enough?
Not enough to value
Not enough to want
Not enough to try to understand
The cool of your indifferent waters cannot calm the fury of not being loved enough
Only fire can calm the fury
Fire that consumes the letter I wrote to you
The violent orange of ember
Converts the pain to ash
The ash to smoke
The smoke to sky
Death has marked the hills tonight
But this time the death of a dream
My fingertips, disabled by the cold
Are none the less hooded in the ash
Veiled by the hollow silence of this act and promise
To never come after your love again
Picking through the ash and snow
For a message left behind by the fire
The finality of a lesson learned
Is summed up in the two remaining words I find
The only two words not eaten by the flame
Barely visible through the powder grey lien of the ash
And the words are
The world.