Experience Tumblr Like Never Before
I've nodded and being complicit in my own destruction, maybe more than I should have. because that was way easier than arguing about it, so much easier than just saying no because I am so used to the word falling on deaf ears. Our relationship wasn’t that bad, I say to my girlfriends. But I would close my eyes and leave my body and whisper to my bleeding heart: turn over, you don’t need to like it. god knows that’s not what he wants anyway. you just need to do it. close your eyes and lose yourself to him. do what he wants. do it. felt myself cower into nothingness. again.
You seem like the type that would happen anyway.
I smile politely and listen to him as he went on about how sexy he thought my vulnerability was.
My trauma a commodity, a mere accessory to him.
I am the saint in the stained glass window now.
I wonder if I’m the type when he kept his hands where they were even when I asked him to stop.
The way he mistook my shrinking for permission.
My fingertips were so thin then,
Pale, peeling skin and a wrecking ball in the empty space in my chest.
I wonder if I’m the type when a man I don’t know follows me home,
The way I tried to swallow the problem, to drop my throat into a whisper.
To survive by blending, by not being the victim,
Maybe I had always asked for it.
Maybe this just happened to girls like me.
You sure it wasn’t just a shitty relationship? He asks.
I answer the boy’s question with well-practiced silence.
Give into the chokehold of this quiet dehumanizing moment I had grown so used to by now.
Whisper to my body: you know what to do.
Succumb to the numbness, lose yourself to him all over again.
I remember seeing my abuser across the train platform
the way my silence met his.
the fear twisting itself between my ribs as he grinned at me,
asked if I missed him
I watched the anger flash across his face as my silence met his rage.
I got on the next train and physically collapsed,
had a panic attack that lasted an hour.
Didn’t speak for the rest of the day.
So you’re damaged goods, my ex boyfriend laughed after I told him about my abuse.
I laugh with him as I feel the silence catch in my throat.
He confirmed my fears:
That this body is worth nothing now.
It would never be desirable ever again.
Never told anyone how I locked myself out of my own body,
how I’d never be able to go back now.
Even if I did, what would be left?
How does the burnt forest learn to trust the sun again?
He was probably right,
All the nights I spent tearing at my skin,
Trying to reach something new,
Something that had yet to be touched by him,
Something pure.