it’s been years, and I still scream
halfway through the night.

I still wake up drenched in sweat and tears,
feeling his grip around my wrist.

when I take a shower,  I find myself
still trying to scrub him off me.
I’m still trying to erase the
cigarette burn on my right hand,
the one he gave me when
he was drunk and angry.

sometimes, I scrub my skin until I bleed. not intentionally, of course.
I don’t want to hurt myself.
I’ve hurt myself enough over the years,
and I have the scars to prove it.

all I want is to scrub him off of me.
I want to feel clean again.

but no matter how raw I scrub myself,
the fingerprints and bruises still linger.

Some people erase my warm feelings for themselves by their blindness and deafness for my feelings and tell others in my absence that Spriha has changed.

Erase my face from your page
Edit me out of the life you portray
But the pictures of you left
Baby I took them

I watched your life up close
Sat on the front row
Never thought I'd just be
Your photographer

I used to be the spark
I used to steal your heart
You were a flash so bright
When life got dark

I used to be your moon
Your sunset too
Would've spent my life
Making you see how I see you

Now my only role
Now my only role
Now my only role
Was your photographer

I want to learn how to live again
Not for you, but for myself
I want to erase those memories,
I’ve kept buried in my heart for so long
I want to heal,
Every single aching wound
That you caused, in the name of love
I want to set my soul free,
Burning it all down.

If you could erase the past, would you?
It’s a question I find myself asking all the time.
I know they say it makes you who you are today,
but I don’t want to be the way it’s made me;
so untrusting, so scared I’ll always get hurt,
running away from all the people who say they’re there.
So, if you could erase the past, would you?
Or would you rather remember the hurt of it all?

If you could stop time for a little just to breathe,
would you want to take that minute or keep going?
There are times when it all feels like it’s too much,
but I know if I stopped I wouldn’t keep going;
knowing that there’s still so much I don’t know.
This world is making my mind spin way too often.
So if you could stop time for a minute just to breathe,
would you want to take that minute or just keep going?

I keep trying to erase the memories, the feeling, the sensations, because what we had was an illusion.