Let’s size up our traumas, let’s raise a glass to bad parenting,
let’s compare bruises the way housewives compare recipes.

We swap stories of bad lovers,
car accidents,
overdosing on hope,
almost-drowning.

We trade confessions like currency.
We laugh too readily at our mirror images
of damage and bad decisions.

We catalogue our griefs and fractures,
wrap them in self-ridicule,
arrange them lovingly inside little boxes.

We keep it light the way you keep knives in a drawer.
Then one day it’s no longer about what happened before we met,
but the fact that you remember
which version of the story I told first.