I'm scared of my bedroom.
(1)
I'm unsettled by how it feels to sit on the edge of my bed. It feels like waiting. The present has blurred, my thoughts are stuck on shuffle with my memory inkblotted to cope.
I still don't know how deep the roots go, and I don't know what they're digging through. I'm uncomfortable with the words, with naming anything other than every small, peripheral detail I can remember.
I could tell you that the room was humid, and there was condensation on the windows because the bathroom fan wasn't on. The tiles were medium-sized and off-white, and there wasn't anything but an unassuming handsoap pump on the left edge of the sink. I know what I was wearing, which parts of my camisole got wet, how the junctions of the tiles made my knees hurt, how slippery the bath was, how high its edges were and how full it was. I can tell you that, and more, but I can't pronounce the words. I can't go near them.
It feels like inflicting violence onto my body, humiliating it. I'd rather not have to say, just like I'd rather forget again, just like I'd rather it never happened.
I feel so alone. My mind feels injured and raw. The caroussel of memory says things about me that hurt to sit with. I am confronted with every response I had to violence that has nestled into me like a trauma of its own. It feels embarassing to call it shame, because I'd rather exist next to my own suffering than acknowledge that it has a home deep inside me.
(2)
I'd rather be under a man still, because being a scene of violence without a violent man to love is terribly lonely.
My touch is too tender for the world I was born into. It has never soured, it has never become sharp or vindictive. It stays, waiting, because there is no one to touch lovingly.
I touched every man as an act of love, for us, for our survival. Even if I hated the fact that we were made to live. Even if I hated living. Even if my touch traced their brutality with an intimacy I knew no where else.
I grew love that has no where to go. I grew love when there was no light, no kindness, no gentleness without coercion or confusion, no one other than me to care for my perfect wounds or untangle the knots in my hair. I grew love that I'm still too scared to let be unfiltered. I fed it with my desperation, the humanity they saw to extract pain from, my limited understanding of what it meant to be good when the world had all but left me for dead.
I am no one if not for my best attempt at love.
...
I have no one to wait for. I have a family to wake up to. But no one is with me.