There was a girl who used to look in the mirror and tell herself one thing she loved about herself every day.
She always smiled,
she sung in the shower
and spent all of her hours
comfortable in her own skin.
She always found a reason to be alive
even when the clouds took over her mind,
She wrote poetry in the sky.
Now, she stares blankly at an unrecognizable face, hating what she sees. She spends
hours trying to scrub away the fingerprints left by the hands that took her love away,
and she always looks down while walking through a crowd.
But why?
She is constrained –
handcuffed to the essence of him
as she paces within a cage built from her own bones,
trying to create a safe place
as the secrets eat away.
There is no escaping the haunting memory,
and he walks free.
He grasps tightly on a failure to see
that no means no.
He is ignorant to the fact that even if no words are spoken at all, it still means no, and
she could not speak so don’t try to say
it wasn’t rape –
it doesn’t matter what he thought it meant,
there was no fucking consent.
He chewed her vulnerability into pieces and spit it in her face,
painted her in hatred,
and scarred her body with a never-ending disgrace,
an on-going nightmare
that she has to encounter every time
she sees herself in a god damn mirror.
Instead of love,
she feels Regret climbing up her throat as an old friend, whispering, how fucking sweet it would be to take it all away and forget.
She exists outside of the skin
she was given,
outside of her temple,
and she does not see –
she doesn’t take notice to the sun reflecting in her eyes,
or the dimples of her smile,
that hold a promise of better days
to follow,
she does not know,
the beauty that holds her face in its hands;
how it has kissed her sweeter than any boy has kissed her lips before, and how it has run its fingers through her hair,
Beauty,
radiates from her mind.
Every thought that has ever been her own dances in each breath she takes,
and she sits through the night,
crying, trying to rip off her skin
because he made her body so difficult to exist within.
She does not know how the stars long to hear her dream,
how empty the sky is without her laugh.
She does not know she is still beautiful through the continuation of self-destruction,
that destruction is still a form of creation,
and soon enough
she will be brand new.
Now, he is the reason
She writes her poetry on her wrists.
He is the reason she cannot wrap herself in the love she deserves as she tries to fall asleep,
the love she needs,
she cannot feel anything other than a constant state of empty.
He is the reason she forgot all of the reasons she should be alive and he is the reason,
she was never able to realize all the great things about herself that was left to count for.
He is the reason she does not believe in love,
not even love for herself,
any more.
