My friend puking out her Christmas dinner like a little girl trying to scrub off that uncle’s touch who tells her she is his favorite kid.
For her dad fat shames her every day.


My friend’s parents sending her to therapy because they don’t get how she can like a boy as well as a girl. Or rather don’t try to, because calling it phase is so much easier than explaining to the neighbors how that is who their daughter is. They are oblivious to what it is like to live in a home where you are treated like a victim of your existence.


My friend needs help, a little attention and someone to talk to.
His family is ashamed, how they could have done better for him, how they’re responsible for the things inside his head and I still don’t know what depression does to him, his family doesn’t like to talk about it.
They’d rather consider him possessed because anything is better than people knowing that he needs therapy and love and care. “Their son can’t be suffering from mental illness, they’re a happy family.”


My friend tells me she’s turning into her mother, and her mother let me tell you, she’s fabulous and fierce for she has been through things harsher than a lover who never says,'I love you’ but wants you to be their ***** little secret and you love them a little too much to deny. My friend, she had an anxiety attack last night for she can’t go out with her guy friends, neither talk to a classmate for too long because her boyfriend might start ****-shaming her. I disapprove and tell her she is not turning into her mother but when I sit in their living room, and aunty brings me snacks while talking to me about life within these faint green walls of the house and what did I eat for breakfast. I ask her to go out sometimes because there are so many things out there that she’d be experiencing and creating, friendship, weather, languages, people, art, emotions. And smell some sunlight in the lush greens fields. She says she’s not allowed to, like a kid calling its mother, "Ma". Her husband loves his ***. And her helplessly hazardous heart, too drained to take ‘harlot’ for a word from an alcohol-soaked throat.
The same walls that once adored their wedding photographs now question their love.


My friend’s girlfriend telling him she loves him but they can’t be together because she’s doesn’t want to be seen with him in the streets. But she seeks his warmth in the winter and leaves right before spring. He loses a little bit of himself every time she does that. He blames himself for what love does to him.


The woman who wears a heavy heart to the bed, finds it difficult to put herself to sleep, holds her dog for a little too long. Whose husband refuses to try therapy.
For I can't margin in metaphors, the agony within the wives who haven't been touched for years.
And the woman who feels a little less human after every night her husband forces himself on her. Because she's, his wife. His. Possession not prized but objectified.
The wife whose husband refuses to wear a ******, she gulps down pain every morning with the pills.
Families of these women, who were taught to think that is how the society functions and who are unwilling to unlearn.      


My friend’s brother asking her to stop wearing that short skirt around guests. There's a hole in her heart every time she remembers the traces his hands left on that infertile body of the kid that looked just like her. He pretends like it never happened.