And as he leaves me with his words of wisdom His blessing I am expelling every sound he utters away from myself I flinch from his touch A pat on the back is like acid on my skin In his presence I am forced to tape myself up Whether it is to keep myself from exploding or from falling apart I still don't know But there are times when my pieces begin to shake and quiver so violently that I start to leak and a storm rages in my head while the rain escapes through my eyes It is in that moment that I scream at him to leave, without making a sound And it scares me that he knows what I look like naked because he has stared at women with my same body on the internet and has drooled over the same curves and lumps that I have And it scares me how he can sound so sane. So sane that he convinces himself that he is stable And it scares me that no one but me and my mother will ever truly understand how distorted his thought process is All this fear and anger sit, rotting inside my stomach and at the center of the mass of hate, there is a spot of sadness for the good dad that left when I began to understand the things a young child should not be able to understand