I get it.
It’s easier to make monsters
than mirrors.
Easier to dip brushes
in blame,
color the past in broad strokes
of “he hurt me”
instead of “I’m broken too.”
You hang our history
in that museum of memory
where every frame
features someone else’s failure
never your fingerprints
on the shattered glass.
I walk those halls sometimes.
See myself,
fangs bared,
eyes red,
a villain stitched together
from every lie
you needed to tell yourself
to sleep.
Each canvas:
a scream
trapped in acrylic.
Each name:
a tombstone
in your mental mausoleum.
But how many portraits
before you realize
the only common thread
is the hand holding the brush?
You keep painting
to forget,
to stay numb,
to convince the world
it was always them,
never you.
But healing don’t live
in curated suffering.
When you finally scrape
the layers off the canvas,
look past the shadows,
see the soft ghosts
of your own mistakes
haunting the corners
maybe then
you’ll paint something honest.
Something messy.
Something real.
Not a gallery of grief,
but a window.
Not a villain.
Not a victim.
Just a girl
who learned to tell the whole story
out loud.
The Ramblings of Bob Christian 