If I’d known years ago that that feeling of uselessness inside me

that often accompanies me sitting in the quiet of my recliner where I know

no one can see me,

was really that same feeling I’d experienced as a child when I knew

no one did,

each time You did nothing after you-know-who hurt me,

I think I would have thanked You for making sure I never lost myself

so much I couldn’t draw a parallel between me in the past

and me in the present.

But the truth is, I was so in survival mode I could always draw one

and learn,

and then thank myself after,

like I was the only one that had a way into and out of me. Yeah, well,

that self-containment mechanism never stops grinding out new stuff.

It’s why last night, when I sat down to meditate and began chanting

a lovingkindness mantra I learned in a meditation class a while back,

and nothing happened to make me feel any better about everything,

I realized the anxiety I was feeling was the same anxiety I felt as a child

when You didn’t come to save me from my abuser and all I had was

my own sore and raw body to sit there with.

That self-acknowledgement was a little piece of me I didn’t know was there,

and one far more ordered and elegant than I care to take credit for,

and just as I’d given up on hope it dropped snugly into the broken

perception revolving inside my head that had always felt bad about hating

You for not being there, where, in its own way, it, little random it proved

how we were there for one another after all.