By six

the anatomy of damage

By six
there were already bite marks on the inside of your cheeks.
they peeled you back like fruit,
fingernails scraping down your back,
like they were trying to see what you were made of.
what could be kept and enhanced,
and what needed to go.

before you know what you’re looking for in a face,
you’ve already named pain as love,
and now you can’t tell them apart.

By six,
you’re all raw meat and nerve endings,
a mouth without language,
a spine just beginning to harden.
and they pressed themselves into you,
elbows-first, knuckles grinding in.

Now you wear it under your skin.
the blueprints etched on tendon and cartilage,
a symphony of misfires in your nervous system.
Sometimes it clicks when you walk,
like old bones arguing with new ones,
or it aches when someone says your name too kindly.

By seventeen,
you’ll call it “quirky,” or “how I am.”
You’ll write it into bios, make it funny.
as if it didn’t once hollow you out from the sternum up.

but really, you’re still six.
Still swallowing glass because someone said it was sugar.
And sure enough, you’ll grow skin over it.
Cover that one with tattoos.

By twenty-four,
you name it, call it “healing.”
But some things are too deep.

They are tucked behind the ribs,
threaded into the lining of your stomach.
They are etched into the smiles of all your masks,
they linger in the way you vanish mid-sentence,
and how you love like a wound waiting to reopen.

By six, you’re all done—
your organs,
your posture,
the way your mouth forms apologies before thoughts.

The scar tissue learned to smile,
it’s meat pretending to be a memory.

Just to undo it all at 30.
To peel and rip your beliefs apart,
to claw and tear at the seams.

And at 34, you’re left wondering:
Where do the masks end, and the meat begin?
And if I peel them all off, will there be anything left but bone and habit?

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