Freaky Frankenstein

they feel like knives wrapped in the softest silk

A lullaby right before the slaughter.

I've lived on hunger long enough,

I have learnt my lesson

Not to mistake it for a feast.

Love—

A foreign concept,

A trembling thing,

However, whereever

It stands at my doorstep,

soft-knuckled,

offering warmth I never ordered,

whispering kindness

like it’s not a loaded gun.

But I’ve seen soft things rot,

seen velvet kindness curl

into the fangs of a snake..

Fool me once, you'll never get me twice.

So don’t ask me to believe in "nice."

Nice is a mask,

a slow, sweet poison

with an aftertaste of regret.

I only know the language of loss,

the sharp-edged dialect of abandonment.

Care too much, I might just get scared.

Hold me too gently,

a graveyard where shadows linger long after the sun surrenders.

I don’t rest; I crash, I collapse, I crumble.

Drowning my mind in the dim glow of a screen,

scrolling through mindless noise until my brain numbs enough to shut off.

A coward’s escape,

a desperate act of self-sabotage to keep the ghosts at bay.

I’m too afraid to let my mind wander,

too weak to face the darkness lurking behind closed eyes.

Dawn mocks me as I finally drift into unconsciousness,

but even then, I am not free.

I am hunted in my sleep.

I wake each day with a filth no water can cleanse,

a sickness festering beneath my skin.

I remember nothing, yet I know too much.

I know exactly what my treacherous mind was up to,

dragging me back to old horrors,

forcing me to feel their hands all over again.

Their touch is a parasite burrowed deep,

a poison that seeps into my marrow, nesting in the dark.

They branded me,

and no matter how far I run,

their fingerprints are still burned into my bones.

This is the cruelest torment—

trapped within my own skin,

each heartbeat a grim reminder of decay.

Horrified by the labyrinth of my mind,

where thoughts twist into grotesque shapes,

and memories carve jagged scars,

haunted by echoes that refuse to die.

A relentless assault—

nerves frayed, sanity unraveling,

conspiring in silent agony,

A hand on my arm, and suddenly my skin feels too tight. A certain smell, and my vision tunnels. A familiar tone of voice, and I’m somewhere else entirely—frozen, numb, shivering, gone. Not screaming. Not fighting. Just… vanishing. And yet, every time I flinch, every time I pull away, every time I don’t have an explanation for why I feel like I’m falling through ice, I’m met with, "Why aren’t you over it yet?"—as if trauma has an expiration date.

Then I stumbled upon this line in The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk:

"The act of telling the story doesn’t necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that remain hypervigilant, prepared to be assaulted or violated at any time."

And it hit me like a punch to the gut. Because trauma isn’t just a bad memory—it’s a glitch in the system, a short circuit in the body’s wiring. It doesn’t care that I don’t remember the details. It lives in my bones, in the way my hands shake when someone stands too close, in the way I disappear inside myself at the wrong kind of touch. People act like healing is a motivational montage, like I can just journal my way out of flinching at sudden noises or feeling like a crime scene in my own skin. But some ghosts don’t care if you name them. Some wounds don’t close just because you’ve acknowledged they exist. they just scab over and split open again.