Good Enough.

For all those times you told me,
I wasn't good enough,
I cried in the bathroom,
Just so from the outside, I could look tough.

Tough like that bridge that'll never break,
Or that muscle in your body that'll never ache,
Maybe, the foundation of that bridge was hit by an earthquake,
Wanting all of your care and empathy, or perhaps just a flake.

What do I need to do to be good enough?
Climb mountains or swim seas,
Or run through deserts, barefooted.
Would that appease?

But what if I reach to you, bleary and beaten?
Or my reliance on you, fully eaten?
Would that feed your masculinity, your misogyny,
Or should another prick furthermore sweeten?

Sweeten to the extent that it turns bittersweet,
Your words had wounded me, from top to the feet,
I felt like the machine that's weary and obsolete,
Whose axles and pulleys could be thrown out in the street.

You never had known, I wasn't street meat,
I was farm-grown, golden, sunkissed wheat,
A household delicacy, a delectable treat,
But darling! You'd never know. Your cognition was never neat.

For all those times I swam through oceanic waves,
There's this handful of lessons, I've proudly embraced,
From the lot, there's one I've highly placed,
It is, that 'regret has the most lasting after-taste.'

The other ones being, 'what glitters is not gold',
'When you don't get something, you just gotta hold,
Even when it's terribly scorching, or relentlessly cold,'
'Some cuts leave scars that hurt even more, when they're old'.