I stare at the street‑lamp’s rusted spine—
a crooked finger pointing to the night we grew up in,
the neon glare that once lit the shadows of addicts
arguing over a bottle, over a bruised heart.
What if I could fold that iron into a map,
crease it, and toss it into the Atlantic,
letting the tide carry the ink of my lineage
away from the shore where my name was first spoken?
Can time be a thief?—
stealing the blood that binds me to the kitchen table
where my mother’s voice cracked like ancient parchment,
where my father’s silence sat like a tombstone,
etched with the dates of betrayal and whispered apologies?
I am a modern‑day exile,
a wanderer in the vein of the Jews who fled Babylon,
the Irish who boarded the Titanic hoping new lands
would not remember the hunger that gnawed their throats.
Their histories are stitched into the very fibers of our skin—
but I want the stitches cut, the seams torn, the cloth unspooled.
I imagine a passport stamped “Free” in a language that does not carry my surname.
A border not drawn by rivers or wars, but by the moment I step onto a plane,
and the engine’s roar drowns out the chorus of my past—
the chorus that sang “don’t trust the blood that runs through you.”
The world whispers: “You can’t erase a lineage.”
Yet the ancients believed in damnatio memoriae—
the Roman decree that erased a man from stone, from coin, from memory.
If the Senate could wipe a name from marble, why can’t I wipe my own?
I would be the first to lay down a gravestone for my own memory—
inscribed only with the date I turned my back on the cracked sidewalks,
the day the city’s smoke no longer stained my lungs.
When I walk away, I will not be sad for the street‑lamps that flicker
like dying fireflies in a gutter, nor for the cries of a mother
who never learned the lullaby of love.
I will be sad for the part of me that still trembles
when the wind lifts the scent of ash from the old house—
a scent that says home even when the doors are barred.
But the melancholy that presses my ribs now is a compass,
pointing toward a horizon where I can rewrite the myth:
no longer the daughter of broken promises, but the architect of a new covenant—
a contract not signed in blood, but in the quiet ink of self‑determination.
So I will board the train that leaves at midnight,
watch the tracks disappear like a line of poetry erased,
and let the future be a field of wheat, uncut, untethered,
where the only harvest I reap is the freedom of having
chosen, finally, to be my own history.
And if the world asks why I fled—
I will answer with the silence of a stone that never fell,
the echo of a name that was never written,
the breath of a soul that finally learned how to breathe alone.