You teach me that human beings were once 75 per cent water
and 25 per cent grief. That now we are 80 per cent anger

and 10 per cent self-loathing.

On my birthday you gift me a PowerPoint, an eighty-slide
investigation into Regret, into Bitterness. What they don’t
teach you at school, you say, and I try to thank you
but the words splinter at the edge of my tongue and shipwreck
on my teeth. I can still see myself then, a timid girl, ten years
young. A small bird, a vulnerable deer. And you: the huntsman
with loaded slingshot and a pouch choking with sentences
to punish me for a childhood you never received. You:
the teacher with lessons that had to be swallowed to be
understood. You: an endless motion of hands rubbing rough
against each other, slowly generating enough electric power
to produce a two-hour blackout in my room.

Yet, the final lesson is forgiveness and they certainly
don’t teach you that

at school.