All my life, I have been told that you learn from experience.
How do you shape traumatic experiences into the word "learn"?
As much as I try to budge and fit it, it pours out.
I try to tell myself that this will make me stronger.
I try to convince myself that this was an experience to learn from.
Those words fill my mind like a foreign language.

The only words I know now are the ones that are spread across my body.
He may have never laid a finger on me but he stole my innocence, my imagination, my childhood.
An 11 year old should not be corrupted with the words of a man.
For 3 years, I believed his words didn't cause harm.

How do I tell my younger self that the pain was a learning experience?
My experience is not a touch of a hot stove or a break of a bone from a fall.
How do I fit my pain in the word "learn"?
For I am not stronger, I am not a survivor, I am losing myself slowly in the sound of his voice.
Drowning myself in a pond of his words, I find myself every night.