I live alone in the spaces between other peoples’ lives,
where the light that does filter through looks dark,
like looking through a window in a building long abandoned,
where the hallways have gathered centuries of dust.
That’s where I reside, in the filaments of broken bulbs,
thrown away and forgotten as if I had never been.
Sometimes I crawl on hands and knees into view,
but I’m quickly glossed over by eyes that focus elsewhere.
I am a monster bricked up in a hidden room in a castle,
a beast that has been ostracised by those who never cared,
the fairy-tale where the beauty turned out to be an ogre,
and tried to drag me back to the hell from whence they came.
The scars I wear have been painted over by someone else’s pain,
and the hatred festered by someone who I thought had loved me
pushes me back into the spaces between other peoples’ lives.