The neighbors seem so vivacious
As they mull about outside my window,
Sun kissing their skin.
The mothers cling to their children,
And sweat clings to the aching muscles of workers
As they bustle,
Hustling mattresses out of the house
And building supplies in.
We exchange cautious smiles
As I sit here in the staleness of my room,
The monotony of this routine.
They are so alive.
I wish I was too.

My soul is afraid
Of when love used to be dangerous,
When home was not synonymous with protection,
And when I wasn't safe
Even from myself.
Memories contuse my heart
And leave bitter embers on my brain.
I wonder when I will be able to let go
Of a past that should not hold so much power
Over a future I've worked so hard for.

Academic conversations about consent are a pure form of agony,
Listening to students and Professor toss around the word like it's a hypothetical commodity,
As if there is question that autonomy and dignity belong to every living thing in that room.
We are asked to dissect the most intimate of physical safeties as if this is a lesson in biology,
Solve 'consent' like a particularly challenging calculus problem,
Pretend as if this didn't happen in the confines of my body.
It's excruciating to have to take an equation,
We'll start with y=mx+b,
And calculate which variables determine basic human decency.
I was young, female, gay, autistic, bipolar,
Clinging to his professions of love like they could stitch the gaping emotional wounds,
And somehow that didn't make me human when he did the math.
I don't know how to argue, Professor, with which philosophical tools,
Professor, that I was a person, Professor,
When he decided to **** me.

My jaw has welded itself shut in an iron grip,
Teeth straining under the load as they are compressed
And ground together,
Aching joint failing to remind me to unclench.
What little sleep I have gotten has also sought to seal my mouth,
Until morning brings with it the sharp pain and popping I am now accustomed to.
Sores line my inner lip,
Pale, stinging pits reminding me how close I am teetering on the edge,
Body clinging to its composure amidst sleepless nights
And adrenaline baths.
A feeling like fire alternately surges up my sternum and over my shoulder,
The taste of stomach acid hot on my burning tongue.
I wonder how long I can keep this up
Until the shoulders , taut with paranoia and effort to keep me safe
Pull my very bones apart with aching muscles.
Perhaps I will be consumed from the inside,
Cracking open the same way my chest already feels.
What am I doing here,
Amongst the memories, the mournings, borrowed time?
I am trying desperately to save her from her certain fate
With love and worry and prayers to her God, the one I don't believe in.
I am also trying to save me, the little girl I used to be,
From the torment I know she will experience anyway,
Wishing fervently I could pull her through time and space
Into a world that isn't trying so hard to **** her for who she is,
The space she occupies unknowingly.
I'm haunted by the mouths of children, the words and hands of grown adults
Who did a thorough job of reducing her to mere mud and human filth.
That girl, young, wide-eyed, desperately lonely and confused,
Burning with self-loathing and pain no one will admit to causing,
Haunts me, climbs into bed and warms her frigid form with my body heat.
I can't save her,
The same way I can't save dying grandmothers or dead friends,
Yet my body is tormented because my mind is tormented.
I am cracking, slowly,
Pieces at a time.
But I'm not so easily bested now.
That little girl built armor and walls and weapons to guard herself,
So I down another cup of coffee,
Pour salt into the sores,
Crack my jaw,
And get back to work.
I have to save myself, too.

Pain erupts in my chest
Like sadness has just cracked my sternum
With its cold, gray hammer.
I cannot touch this hurt
With tears or bandages.
I am simply bleeding internally,
Wondering why anniversaries cut so deep,
But it's not that I nearly lost myself,
Held hands with the reaper.
It's that you preceded me death,
And I wonder why in the end it was you and not me.

Memories slink like silken specters
Across my barren walls
With sticky fingers that pick pocket
My peace of mind,
Steal my sleep,
Leaving sweaty handprints across my skin
And the faint taste of a scream that died on my tongue.
I tell myself that I am safe now.  
Not a soul has breathed in this room since I examined every cranny.
Even I am existing on borrowed air,
As sleep slips so dearly missed from my grasp.
I guard my secrets in darkness while 4 am lingers heavy in this space,
Wishing unconsciousness to take me to a land
Where my heart doesn’t race in terror at every noise,
The shame of what I allowed to be done to me doesn’t echo in my mind,
And the scars are not so tender to the touch.
If only I should be so lucky.
The ghosts are restless in the way they haunt my body tonight.

I say, “I’m having a hard time with my PTSD,”
The words thick in my mouth like I am choking
Or somehow allergic to this admission,
Body, killing itself in an effort to expel the allergen.
I am stuck at a crime scene,
Whole body present for the ****** of me.
I am watching them examine my clothing,
Searching for motive and signs of a struggle,
Nobody staunching the bleeding.
I am a cadaver to them,
Mangled wreckage of what once was and could never be again.
I see the yellow ‘police line’ being rolled out over and over in my mind,
Wondering why the only one watching him break me
Was my teddy bear who’d been cast onto the floor
And the mattress on which I was the sin he committed.
Sometimes I wonder if the blood stained as it ran from me.
Did he think about the ****** when he washed the sheets,
Or was this just another day for him,
He who is lucky enough to inhabit a whole body?
What was it for him about the act of making ghosts,
Leaving me half dead every time,
How he choked the air from my body,
Just enough to separate my soul from my physical form
But never finished the job?
Now, I haunt this in-between space
A purgatory of murdered and broken pieces,
Parts too dissimilar to be reconstructed.
I wonder how they all used to fit into a whole
When their jagged edges now mar my skin,
Spilling blood that no longer runs red in my veins.
It’s blue like the sheets on his bed,
Steel gray for the threat of the sword he wedged under the mattress,
And purple like bite mark bruises up my thighs,
How he opened his mouth and somehow closed mine,
Stole the syllables off my freshly kissed lips,
The taste of morning breath and acid fear welded to my tongue.
I am left to carry my own dead body with hands that don’t feel fully mine.
They’ve left bruises of their own but none on his skin.
There’s no signs of an external struggle,
No blood stored under my fingernails,
Yet I wear the internal wounds like armor.
Closed doors don’t erase the existence of violence.
What happens in silence still leaves an echo,
Even if it’s only the drip of tears on the pillowcase.
I used to be lucky enough to inhabit a whole body,
But he struck me dead at the root of my innocence,
And now I am here telling you a ghost story.
When I say, “I am struggling with my PTSD,”
I mean I am a stuck at the crime scene of me,
But the police are not coming because I didn’t know to ask for them.
How do you tell someone that love left the bruises and you let him
Because your world was too cold to differentiate between being kept warm
And having someone light you on fire?
How do you report a ****** from beyond your own grave?
The “Police Line: Do Not Cross”
Tells me where not to touch,
What to leave alone less the remembering begin again.
It tells me not to let others too close to the scene of the crime,
Not to let them see the evidence locked in my mind.
I am so tired of carrying around my own dead body,
Trying to feel safe in the same place
I once wished he’d just killed me.
How do you escape the crime scene
When the scene of the crime is your own body?