As a young child, I learned to stay safe by hiding in the unlit spaces of rooms. Barefoot, dark curls dripping down a ***** face, I lingered in shadows until they told me each of their names. I studied the quiet; a professor of loving the unloved things.
I remember laying in a yard of bluebells, blades of grass gently caressing my sunburnt cheeks, palming the delicate violet flowers as if they were the most precious commodity, never daring to defile the landscape by picking a single stem. The great alone became my great escape.
Later that summer, my father killed the entire field of wildflowers with poison, and a piece of my innocence died with them. By the time I was married and my husband had destroyed my own garden in a fit of anger, so many parts of me had been burned down, I could have spit ashes from my mouth.
I taught myself to retreat before I was discarded. I learned resilience by maintaining silence while those who were supposed to protect inflicted pain. And now, as an adult, I have honed the craft of rearranging myself into manageable pieces for people to easily digest. I morph myself to fit into spaces I don't belong. I allow touch but never trust it.
And sometimes, I wonder if I'll be another little girl, in another life, who is naive of the cruelty of the world, because she has not felt the sting of it on her own skin.
Dec 14, 2025
Dec 14, 2025 at 7:10 AM UTC
As a young child, I learned to stay safe by hiding in the unlit spaces of rooms. Barefoot, dark curls dripping down a ***** face, I lingered in shadows until they told me each of their names. I studied the quiet; a professor of loving the unloved things.
I remember laying in a yard of bluebells, blades of grass gently caressing my sunburnt cheeks, palming the delicate violet flowers as if they were the most precious commodity, never daring to defile the landscape by picking a single stem. The great alone became my great escape.
Later that summer, my father killed the entire field of wildflowers with poison, and a piece of my innocence died with them. By the time I was married and my husband had destroyed my own garden in a fit of anger, so many parts of me had been burned down, I could have spit ashes from my mouth.
I taught myself to retreat before I was discarded. I learned resilience by maintaining silence while those who were supposed to protect inflicted pain. And now, as an adult, I have honed the craft of rearranging myself into manageable pieces for people to easily digest. I morph myself to fit into spaces I don't belong. I allow touch but never trust it.
And sometimes, I wonder if I'll be another little girl, in another life, who is naive of the cruelty of the world, because she has not felt the sting of it on her own skin.
