i bought a new computer mouse

A flick of a hand. A computer mouse slammed too fiercely against the wooden table.

A flinch. There it was again: the broken shelter of an adult, showing through its cracks and crevices the old architecture of childhood fear. I remember the fights, the redirected anger, the violence of my younger years as a grease stain on a white shirt. Faded enough not to cause a riot. Stained enough to remember.

And for so many years, I have seen those same manners in myself. Worse, I have replicated them. Not toward strangers. Toward the people I love wholeheartedly. I hated the way I reacted. I hated my learned anger, my learned anxiety. I hate how wired I am, how perfectionistic, how easily provoked, how quickly my body prepares for catastrophe because that was how I was raised. I was not allowed to choose my environment. It entered me anyway. It made a home in me. It rendered me ugly on the inside. I wish I could unlearn these awful things I do without thinking. I wish I could be stronger than the hand that raised me.

I wish love alone was enough to make me gentle.