She holds your mouth closed

An effort to prolong the inevitable finding of her efforts

But she doesn’t need to do that, you weren’t going to cry out

Flesh slides over bones without friction

Skin like a rotten peach, soft and slippery and saggy

You’re still young, you with your flushed cheeks and scared eyes

Pupils blown and fear and something ugly

Gnarled and dark and unknown to you at the age of five.

So you don’t know so you can’t tell but you can feel and it feels oh so wrong

 

Then you leave just by chance.

And you wave goodbye

To be polite.

 

Another.

Younger stronger scarier

Her smile frightens you.

And now you know what this is because you’re mature,

You’re eight now.

And she’s fourteen and strange and twisted in her ways

You comply because isn’t it harder to struggle?

You tried once and then there bloomed red upon tile

And your head spun beneath coloured stars as they fell on you,

Scar tissue to decorate you like lashes on those startling eyes

Scattered thoughts and maybe a scream tumble from those ruby lips

Cause it hurts in the way that claret seeps from skin but it also hurts in the foreign way,

deep under.

 

And you leave again,

764 miles away

So you hope it’s all behind you

But 764 miles away you grow numb to it

You reach inside and there lies nothing at all

So you worry worry worry that maybe the numbness isn’t numbness

It’s just a lack of something.

And then come parallels,

Soft lines on your side to decorate you further

And then a bottle of pills

And then a headache in the morning.

And you go on.

 

You go on to discover with contorted disgust

That all the girls that look at you look better to you,

Than other things.

So you think back to five and eight and feel disgust that after that

You feel all of this.

And so you analyse and digest and break down and slowly through the agony you aren’t so

Lacking.

 

And your side earns more decorations and your parents see your blood

And you’re sitting in a pale room on a couch that’s trying too hard

Opposite of someone that thinks you have “psychological traumas”

You don’t tell them about

Losing control and the panicking and the not sleeping and the anxious feeling

And here you are at square one but not quite,

Trying to be more than your memories and “your past”

Putting down poorly constructed phrases hoping it makes you a writer,

Wearing your damaged heart on a guarded sleeve, trying to be romantic,

Looking at your drawn face and scolding your narcissistic tendencies,

But damn if you’re not going to just let go.