My father’s greatest heist was my memories. Moments captured and stolen. My youths end, 1 minute and 30 seconds. Father plays emotional ransom with my lifetime, holds photographs and videos bondage and the price for freedom too high.
I am forever destined to only remember the things he allows me to. He finds me caught, wild and spinning, reminding me that I don’t have permission to erase him. For a second, I almost forgot what this hook felt like. How much it tears me open, how much of me it eats as he draws me in. And he’s always been hungry hasn’t he? Empty film waiting for its movie. Is it true that the memory of pain lives in the body?
I wonder if it can live on film even before it’s born. I pray it doesn’t. I’m not sure if it’s the memories I have that keep me alive or the memories I don’t. At night, I wonder if I can exist without knowing who I was. The time between record and end.
It is the first time I see myself on video. A blocked message from a man whose name is on my birth certificate but I haven’t seen in 10 years. A shadow of the man I once knew. I am the girl he left on tape in dark rooms. Places I escape from in dreams and poetry.
I know girls who have lost pieces of themselves in places they thought gardens, parts of themselves that will always cry out for home. Flowers that never bloomed. Dust on films that rot in dark rooms. We’ve whispered a million goodbyes for something we will never know.
The girl I was only lives on film, hidden somewhere I will never find. Ageless and protected from harm. Father’s home a grave of forevers but a Neverland to the child I was. It gives me peace knowing this version of me he’s stolen on film will never know what comes after. Stuck in a forever I can never know.
Old Home Videos.
Kenya Burton Poetry 