Somebody’s Someone

She is a metaphor to her husband

A cautionary tale to her children

Invisible to herself

She is a wandering ghost

to the house she is locked in

 

She has never been herself

She is somebody’s someone

Or something

 

Her place is in the kitchen

In the jewelry stores

In the gossip of other wives

She goes by somebody’s someone

Never herself

 

Her job is to serve

And to look pretty when needed

Her job is to be witty

at dinner parties

But voiceless

after the guests have left

 

She is her husband’s Barbie

with unnecessary functions

She lives in a haunted Barbie house

The company she can only find

are the ghosts before her

 

There is an old Chinese saying

That women beautify themselves

for the men they please

And she

Dedicates her life to do just that

 

She supports him silently by his side

For most of history

Anonymous was a woman

her name was therefore erased

Remembered only as

somebody’s someone

 

She is a glorious china vase

But inside it

nothing but air

 

She is the stunning wife

The loving mother

She has always been somebody’s someone

Never herself

I often wonder

if there is still a person in her

 

in daytime

She is nurturing and fun

Swallows down her pride

She does her part

She keeps her silence

Put on a disguise

Play the character on the stage

 

The stage

is the concrete home that she is chained to

The character

is what she thought a woman should only be

 

She puts her college degree behind

Her achievements before marriage

Becomes a hollow echo only she can hear

Reminding her of a person she vaguely recognizes

 

Her defiance came out at nights

The has been that hides inside

She tells her children what a woman she was

before their father

All the things she could have become

 

Instead of telling her kids bedtime stories

She cries and screams

Like a child searching for answers

The has been inside her

was shortly awaken

But broken this time

 

And yet to her children

She is the woman from the madhouse

She is nothing but a mockery

With her funny English accent

She is an embarrassment

 

She immigrated to a new land

with her husband

So the accent mocks her

Reminds her

of her no longer tangible free will

 

Yet he

Is a self-made man

An American Dream

Even with the accent present

He will never be put in the same place where she is

 

She is a cautionary tale

An unstable ticking bomb

Her son sees her

and defines women accordingly

Women are crazy, he says

 

Her daughter sees her

and swears not to be the same

To never be

an anonymous

 

Her husband is okay with her unstable mentality

He can tolerate the way

she treats the kids when no one is looking

As long as she looks pretty by his side

And doesn’t reach her hands out to the window

 

Yet when she hears the birds singing outside

And tries to chase back to its origin

When she stops cooking

And doesn’t do the laundry

As often as she did

He filed for a divorce

 

In his mind

Not cooking or doing the laundry for him

Means she has stopped caring for him

 

He sees the madhouse that

he and she cohabits in

But he thinks the madness comes from her

He never sought for a cause

Or a remedy for it

Never saved his kids from it

 

He is the observer and the perpetrator

And the children learned from their father

to see her

As the mad women

 

She is a cautionary tale

A metaphor

An unstable ticking bomb

She is somebody’s someone

Or something

 

Years after their divorce

She still can’t resist reaching her hands towards

her husband

she has lived inside the haunted house

She has been somebody’s someone

for too long to learn to separate herself

from someone else

To be the somebody in her own life

 

Years after their divorce

We still blame her for it

We blame the woman for her madness

For her failure in marriage

Just because she was somebody’s someone

Like how she was taught

 

We blame her for shrinking

Until the haunted house was too big

And she lost herself in it

 

We condemn her

for raising her kids in a madhouse

Locked them in the same cage with her

We ignore the oppression she inherited from her mother

And her mother’s mother

 

We fail to acknowledge that the madhouse

wasn’t the house we dwelled in

But the patriarchy she depended on

And she wasn’t crazy

She was just one of many

 

She is another ghost

She is chained to the haunted Barbie madhouse

Belongs to someone else

Somebody’s someone

 

Even when she is released from it

She still gravitates back inside

Every single time

To be somebody’s someone

Never herself