Somehow
Even now
After everything you've done to me,
I love to see your face.
I think you're beautiful.
I think you're mesmerizing.
Your soul pulls mine
And it always will.
That, I think,
Must be what it means to truly love someone.

I don't remember how to be with someone now.
I remember it was nice.
But today...
I wouldn't know how to share a bed.
How to wrap someone in my arms.
I wouldn't know how to fit my hand into another.
I've forgotten why I miss her.
I remember it was warm, and safe, and happy
But I don't remember how.
I remember our naked bodies used to fit together like halves
Every curve of hers in every valley of mine,
I remember her skin on my skin made us both something new...
But I don't remember how that felt to me.
Why it was so special, so spiritual, so necessary.
I don't remember how to listen to the slow breaths of another person in the early hours of the morning.
I don't remember how to walk down a street hand in hand
Or kiss good night
Or truly look into the eyes of someone else and see the soul inside.
I've forgotten.
It...went.
So quickly.
And now I am in bed alone and I am not sad, or lonely, or angry.
I am just bewildered
That I don't remember how it feels to love someone.

I know why I love horror films
I just never say it.
I love them
Because I am tortured by feelings
By empathy
By kindness
And I'm looking to learn
The kind of safety that comes with ruthlessness.
I'm looking to glance up just for one second into my own eyes in a mirror
And see nothing at all behind them.
Just once.
I think people who love as hard as I do always long to feel nothing.

******* for making me look down
When you deserve to suffer under my gaze.

You will be a chapter in the Bible of my life
And you
Will not fade from me
Because this body is a temple
And I am the god to which it is devoted:
When I am old I will trace the scars on my hands
As proof that I reached for something.
You may try to erase me.
You may even try to unmake me
But love and hate
Look so similar as scars
And thanks to yours we carry matching ones.
I will tell my stories, because they are mine to keep.
I will write about
The girl who made me afraid to walk the hallways of my own school
Her loathing for herself so complete that it swallowed me as well,
And I will shout my words
Because it is my right as a creature with a heart and a voice
And my duty as a human being.
I have led a violent life
Battered by a sea of people
Whose cowardice is stronger than their goodness.
But if I am silent about them
They'll **** me and say I deserved it.
If I am silent
Your threats worked
And you will continue to meet the world with your fear and your viciousness
And leave it uglier than you found it.
So I am here to say that
Whether you hate me or not
I am as sacred as you are
And my life
Is my own.
It is not my job to make you comfortable.
It is not my job to disappear
If you dislike what you see in me.
You don't own me.
You don't own my art.
You don't own my feelings.
You don't own my stories,
And you don't own what I do with them.

There is a sacredness to people who are damaged.
Sometimes I think
That
Is my religion.