The hardest thing so far
Has been realising that it doesn’t go away
That you will always be left needing to do the work
It takes
Just to get out of bed in the morning
Just to feel like you deserve to have another day.
And that
They probably don’t even think about you
Not day to day
You are in the past
A discarded possession
But they are in your present
They are still hurting you
Every single day
And it is exhausting.
I don’t sleep well any more.
Every little noise on the street is a worry,
Because he knows where I live
Because at night
He knows I will be home
Alone.
And I worry
Because I know how much he could hurt me
If he wanted to
Because he has
Because he had the power to kill me
And I felt it
And I would have been able to do
Nothing
And now he must hate me even more
I worry
I should have just kept my mouth shut
But
It was hurting me to do that
It wasn’t keeping me safe any more
But that’s the trouble
Talking about it doesn’t feel safe either
Because he was so good at making me feel worthless
I can only assume that everyone sees me the same way
That my truth is worthless
And every time I talk about it
It puts me right back
There
Dumbfounded and numb
And frightened for my life
And so so completely crushed
By the loss of self and the loss of trust and the loss of the love that I thought was there
And it is exhausting.
Constantly being in a state of reacting to crisis
Flight flight flight but lost and arms flapping uselessly
Wearing concrete boots
Fixed in time and place
The awful blank space
That means I cut off completely and hid
So far inside myself
I’m not sure I’ll ever come out again
To fight
To fight
At first
Felt like it was sited in ignorance
Denial
Of the scale of it
And when you have spent your whole life learning how to mask your pain
Your mistakes
Your shame
It’s so easy to fool everyone into thinking everything is ok
Better than fine
Can’t complain…
I wasn’t prepared for it
And it was so calculated
Systematic
The breaking down of me
Did he watch the performance I did
About survivors
And look at the disgusting statistics
About the lack of justice
And deep down feel confident he could get away with it.
Even I hate to think it
And I am so ashamed of the compassion I have for him
And at first I thought
Hopefully we can still be friends
Because I can’t believe I was so disposable to him
Except I know I was
Just a clearly dissatisfying object in the end
But hopefully we can still be friends…
Because maybe pleasing him will protect me?
But he told me to disappear
Vanish
And that is what he wants.
To destroy
And leave no trace.
And there are all these fun things that I can do now
And all of this work I can make
I can dance and paint and draw and write and sing and dance and laugh and dance and dance until I drop
And all of these wonderful folk who can distract me
Make me feel safe so long as I fill my time with them
And
Keep myself from staring into the mirror at my own angry terrified tearstreaked screaming face
But it starts to leak out at the edges
Eventually
Eventually
It gets you in a chokehold
Pins you down with all its weight
It tells you to say you are a filthy whore, a bitch
And the moment comes when you either give up
Or stop clamping your jaw gasp for breath
Finally say
No
Finally verbalise
And the words
Just spill out
And once they are in the world
You cannot stop them
But that doesn’t mean you have exorcised the damage
I really hoped that it would
Once the words are out there
You have to take responsibility for them
You cannot just bring them into the world
And then abandon them
I had hoped I would feel more protected
And people have been surprisingly good at listening
Mostly
But there are a few
Who don’t want to believe that they were friends with a fiction
And
I can see how that is hard
Maybe he was right
Maybe I am the problem
Why cant I just get over it
Look the other way
Stop inconveniencing people with the uncomfortable truth
And at the other end of things
The idea that to spew out the words that were poisoning you
Is an act of bravery
When it just feels like an awful fear driven necessity
To be attached to that word in this instance
Feels shameful
I cannot reconcile it with what I have done
Because
Never
Will I be the same
Again
I would like nothing more than to put this behind me
But
He murdered so many things in me
But they are still festering
Attached
Like a rotting extra limb.
And even if I try to amputate
I will still feel it’s ghost
Whereas he
Was just trying me on
And walking about in my skin
Until he got bored
Or it didn’t give him what he expected or wanted
So he peeled it off
Put it in a shoebox under the bed
Because he didn’t want it any more
But he didn’t want anyone else to have it
Especially not me
And he really didn’t want anyone else
To see
Who he really was
Or what he had done.
So I stand on the edge
Of an endless
Dark sea
An ill fitting human
Longing to go home
To find her selkie skin
To be able to be my self again…
But it doesn’t fit me any more
I cannot stop crying
I cannot rest
I cannot see how to move forward from this place where the salt gets into my open wounds and they wont stop weeping
Weeping….
And I can’t stop talking now
Because it’s all I have left
And Never will I be the same
Again.
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This piece was created in response to a collaborative prompt form Artist Elinor Rowlands. The above is my contribution but it can be seen alongside her words HERE on the Magical Women website.
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