Just Like Me…

From the day I was born, I learned the trade,
That violence was normal, and love was a blade.
I watched my parents, their tangled snare,
And swore right then I would claim no share.
My father, a drunk, was mean and vicious,
Always paranoid and forever suspicious. 
My mother was distant, a frozen stone,
I learned what it meant to survive alone.
I saw how it trapped her, how love was a chain,
A weapon, a poison, a synonym for pain.
My brain snapped shut and the circuitry fried,
Rewiring the spaces where love should reside.

So I cut the ties. Let the circuits break,
I made two rules for my sanity’s sake:
First, I would never be wed or bound,
No ring on my finger would ever be found. 
Second, no children. The instinct missed,
That natural warmth simply did not exist.
Babies left me cold, untouched, unswayed,
No cooing, no holding, no brooding displayed.
And yet, ironies cling to the things we shun,
Children flocked to me, every last one.
The less that I wanted them near my space,
The more they gravitated to my face.

Then life turned the page, as it often does,
With an unplanned turn and a jolt of fuzz.
A baby arrived. But fate played a twist,
It bypassed the wall that I thought would resist.
He was born with conditions, autistic and blind,
Crafted by a mysterious, sequestered mind.
How cruel that those long lashed, beautiful eyes,
Would never look back at me and recognise. 
To not once be seen in that deep, dark gaze,
Lost forever behind the haze.

Yet in his quiet, we share a thread,
His wiring matches the path I tread.
His autism mirrors my OCD soul,
We both need the order, the rules and control. 
The retreat from the noise of the human crowd, 
A strict routine, where no change is allowed. 
Shaped by the very same strict design,
Two separate worlds that perfectly align. 
Perhaps if he hadn’t had differences too,
I couldn’t have loved him like I do. 
I wanted no children, it wasn’t meant to be, 
Yet the universe handed over—a child just like me. 

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