I hide parts of myself from everyone, protecting my sharp edges from cutting the people around me. I am stiff, rigid, and smothered in bubble wrap to stop my grief seeping through the encasing of my frigid body, poisoning anyone I come close to.

I wash agony off my face and take my medication just like I’m told. I wait for the shaking to stop, for the flashbacks to stop, for the world to stop spinning. I go to a new group and I am asked to talk about myself. I say, define delusional. I say, gut me alive, watch my insides spill onto the pavement and then tell me what I have left. tell me what I am or what I could’ve been. If I wasn’t, if he didn’t, if they only. I say, if you saw a monster in the mirror, what would you do? I do not talk about the girl who wanted to live so badly it hurt. I do not talk about the girl who writes poems about her mother because she thinks she never loved her. I do not talk about the rape. I will not talk about the rape. I will never talk about the rape. I tell them, I am scared the reflection in the mirror is me. I am scared if I say these things out loud it makes it real. makes me real. makes what he did to me real. I say, nice to meet you.

I do not know how to be loved if it is soft and kind. I am not soft. I am not kind. I wake up in the middle of the night in a puddle of sweat, running from it all. If your love is fleeting, do not bore me with it. Do not torture me with maybe. Do not breeze by me on a winters day. Love me in your desperation. Obsessively and hopelessly. Love me fiercely, or do not love me at all.

The days drag on and the winters are cold. My eyes, glazing over from the stillness of it all. I could have been anyone. I could have been anyone. I could have been anyone. And yet, this is who I am. The numbness of it all. No one notices my skin that tinges blue. I keep forgetting to breathe. I could have been anyone. There is no gentle way for me to say I wish I wasn’t me. That my skin is stuffed and sutured with false hope. So when you hear my gasps, do not let god fool you, the blood that stains the ground will forever dry cold.

I am always giving too much of myself away in love. Filling your plate with seconds at the dinner table, as my food grows cold. You tell me you love me, as I am pulling the moon so it always shines on you, and even when the tide changes, I learnt how to swim, just so you could float. My heart with it’s own internal echolocation, guiding to only you. Do you grasp the depth of it all? As the grip tightens around my throat, a silent plea escaping my lips, I surrender fragments of my being to ease your burden, to soothe your hunger. Yet it is my own hands, that tighten, as I give more and more. My sacrificial offering, the haunting reminder, that I am drowning in the depths of my own unspoken longing.

I sit in the waiting room, while my shame puddles beneath me. A constant drip since I was a kid. I tried to burn it down and my god, I burnt everything down around me, but my shame still survived. My merciful body afloat in the ocean, where my shame refuses to sink. How do you escape a monster that sings so sweet that you forget and harmonise to their hymns?

If there is a god, he knows I’m coming. If there is a god, he’s familiar with my screams. Silence is not something I am privilege to. Every molecule of my ache, hissed. Every rip of my skin, the crack of my bones, it was all familiar. A lamb waiting for slaughter. A girl in a dark alleyway. The bitter taste of my fury. It was all too familiar. My body, an echo chamber for my screams. I do not have enough time to tell you my story. Listen for the screams. Silence is a privilege.

You’d love me if I was gentle, right? If I wasn’t so bitter at my mother. If I wasn’t so loud, so blunt, so damaged from my past. You’d love me if I was smaller, right?

My father is in the kitchen cooking dinner. Pots are banging, and the peas are overflowing. I ask him for the fifth time when dinner will be ready. ‘When it is in front of you’ he says.

I crack myself open. I sway to the left. I cry like a wind charm on a gusty day. I have never felt responsible for my body and the damage I have done. My birth certificate in my mothers hand and a cigarette in the other. She says, loving me feels like dying as she wheezes between her words. All the damage I have done. All the damage I have done.

And there is a hole in me / that I can’t describe / like looking in the mirror and seeing the girl you were before it happened / wondering how you go back / to before, to before

I am the flicker of a cigarette, the last ember, my mother’s rage, whatever you call a living thing that burns. I live like an open flame that is ready to ignite at anytime. We all forget that open flames are the start of all wild fires but not me, I know all about the catastrophric effect of wild fires, I am my mother’s daughter after all.

I was in your rumbling stomach. You wouldn’t touch me when I was hard, you devour me now I’m soft. I believed in the morning, in the mid of your rumble, I would become the only thing you could stomach. My bitterness tingling on the tip of your tongue. Taste me as if I am the only thing that could ease your hunger. If I am just another meal to you, please be tender with my heart. I am just another girl trying to survive, after all.

In the winter I suffered but in the spring I came alive. My void, now a garden bed, full of lilies and hope. In the spring I came alive and I stuffed it with all the love that I refused to feel. I am spring. I am brand new. I am the hope that’s caught in the back of your throat. Do not forget to sing when the roses come, I planted them for you.

My father used to hit me so hard that I used to see stars. So I decided to name them to not feel so alone. Now the night sky is a portrait of wounds from when I was a child. If I cannot pray to the stars, then who? My prayers, they echo through space looking for a home, but home is just as empty as childhood.