Lover, fighter, friend, woman

But they're not.

Words can change minds and lives

Words can tear a heart apart or soothe a broken soul.

Words can destroy somebody's world, and words can build empires.

Words are powerful magic, so use them well.

Most days I'm honestly ok, I've survived

And then all of a sudden I wake up in the night

Screaming, and it feels like I'm back there in that spot

That broken child, begging for it to stop

I can still feel your hands, in places they didn't belong

I can still feel your breath on the back of my neck

And your voice whispering, 'don't scream, or you'll end up dead'

I can still feel your weight on top of my chest

And that rending, inescapable pain between my legs.

And then the self-disgust, that feeling of being tainted,

Wishing this body was like a coat, and I could exchange it.

You might be in jail now, and very rightly so

But so am I, and for me there's no release date, no parole

From this body, from this mind, from the damage that you left

From the prison of my shattered consciousness.

When I was a little girl I thought that magic was in waving a wand

And having a shiny cloak that makes you vanish when you put it on

And then as I got older, I started to figure out

That magic was in real life, in conviction, and doubt

In love, in loss, in pain, in emptiness turned into faith

In all the crisscrossing paths, through so many dimensions blazed

In all the peculiar people, the whacky and the weird

The ones who hover on the edges, distant but oh so clear

The travelers and the drifters, disappearing just like they come

The shooting stars who burn too bright, blinding like the sun

The ones who leave this world too soon, taking with them a piece of our hearts

The versions of ourselves we don't realise are watching, from the ending back to the start

The ones we meet once in a lifetime, who touch our souls with their glow

And the strangers who leave us with questions whose answers we'll never know