my love,
the world has given you so much pain.
i can't bear it for you
and it breaks me to watch.
but i will crawl with you
i will stumble with you
i will fight with you
and i will pray with you.
i wouldn't blame you
if you kept your eyes closed the rest of your life,
but i promise with everything in my soul
that if you decide to open them,
i will be the first thing you see

My then boyfriend
Now husband
Never forgave you for putting your hand on my thigh,
Casually mentioning the ******* beaches in the south of France.
Your daughter needed a chaperone on your family’s upcoming vacation.

You went and I stayed of course
The ******* beach all the poorer for my absence.

I am not the kind of girl who
Finds herself at Disney Paris at the end of the movie.
That’s not the way this movie ends, anyhow.

12 years later
One lung lighter
Tens of millions denser
and poised to send your daughter
to Dartmouth
Or Tulane
Or anywhere she’d rather.

She’ll have everything the world could offer her
In exchange for her father.

A parent shouldn’t have to know.

So I forgave you the hand thing
And the lewdness of a drunken survivor
Poised on the lip of an ever-widening hole.

If you asked to take me now,
I think I’d go.
I’ve always wanted to see the Louvre.
I can almost hear it:
The clicking heels and murmurs,
Your overwrought humanities professor explanations of this or that and me humoring you with appropriate reverence as always,
And the dead certain silence of the thing we will not speak about,
Pointedly conspicuous in its absence,
Filling the space between.

It's in the struggle of achieving dreams where adversity introduces a man to himself.
Those are the same moments where you brawl with the inadequacies that plague you. The grotesque sight of failed expectations and debacles that burden your mental like a clogged bathtub.

I've met myself on many occasions in the heat of adversity.
Each man different than the last, because I rejected each mediocre version of myself and demanded more - better!
I have done this until there was no more to meet.

I can't tell you who I am, but for the first time in many moons...I have met the person I worked so hard to be and just for a brief moment, I can finally be content with who I am.

It’s funny how a song can trigger so many emotions
Happiness
Sadness
Grief
Anger
Rage
The therapeutic tones and lyrics can calm the soul or set your world on fire.
I’m listening to “killing in the name of”
My favorite part of the song
The build up of the last chorus
As he growls the words “******* I won’t do what you tell me”
It excites me and brings me to tears
I hate that I can’t listen to this around people
I’ll skip it or bellow the words when no one can hear me
It’s been 4 years
that rage hasn’t left my soul
All the sadness
Hurt
Rage
It’s still there
Most days I don’t feel like it is.
But when that song comes on
My oppression
My scars
Are still here

I saw his name
And everything around me changed

Blurred vision
Healed wounds becoming a fresh incision

I can’t breathe
But I couldn’t leave

Survival instincts
Thoughts of wishing I was extinct

Racing thoughts
I cannot connect the dots

Your name
Is my downfall rain

The kind I dread
Sometimes I can’t get out of bed

You see the outside and think I’m acting stupid
But let me sit you down and tell you what he did

Maybe but it depends
Maybe you’ll understand then.

I am a crumpled sheet of paper in the hands of my predators
Their hands snaked around me, squeezing the life from my body, leaving me to collapse into their want
Too young to realize, too weak to fight back
………
                                                He choose the game he wanted to play
                                                and I became a dice he could roll around
                                                in the palm of his hands
                                                         But this body is my temple, you lost                                               my game and there will never be round two
………
My own thoughts strangled me as my body refused to listen to my brain
To touch my skin felt like fire burning through my veins, fire that ignited my predator
Hopelessly sinking into the bed that became an ocean, water drowning me and continuously pulling me further down
………
                                                        ­ She destroyed my innocence where
                                                       “playing house” meant I played victim
                                                         and she played the predator
                                                        ­ But this body is my temple and you
                                                         did not receive an invite to my
                                                         house p­arty
………
They had the power to take my dignity into the palm of theirs hands and crumble it up
We are told when we crumble up a sheet of paper, you can never make it the way it was before
………
                                                      ­    He threw me over his shoulder like a
                                                   rag doll and brought me to the place that
                                     was once “my room”and is now “my nightmare”
                                  But this body is my temple and not for you to play
                                                 with like a doll you received on a holiday
………
Words disintegrating from my lips with the ashes of consent and destroying my trust for any human to touch my skin
Circling the drain of intimacy
………
                                                    ­ They strapped me down and taught me
                                                        that crying meant I was “asking for it”
                                                             But this body is my temple and
                                                             my ­words are louder than your lies
………
I wear the damage on my heart
My body used against me more than the number of fingers on my hand
………
                                                       But this body is my temple and when I
                                                                ­           broke free of your *******,
                                                        ­                 my temple grew taller than
                                                                ­          your hands could touch me
………
I am a crumpled sheet of paper escaping the hands of my predator

Heavy, the dark clouds descend
Pressing down upon my shoulders.
I fall to my knees as I try to scream,
But my lungs will barely breathe.
Thick ash coats my throat,
The sweetness of death
Dancing across my tongue.
Thoughts like electricity
Shocking all of me,
Interchangeably.
Forehead meets concrete with desperate force;
The pain a mere whisper
Against a raging wall of emotions.
I beg for death to break this hell
My own consciousness the walls of this prison.

On the outside I am calm:
Still, silent, high-functioning.
The gift of my survival,
Now the curse that's killing me.

If I had to anonymously write about being hogged by depression, my pens would run out of ink before I could finish.
While reading it, you might even conclude that the author finally succumbed to the morbid thoughts and machinations lurking around his overwrought mental. When in reality...

10 toes is what I still stand on.