I'm somewhere new and old.
My body's shell has softened. I collapse under a gentle drape, trying to prevent pieces of me from shattering too far out. These moments hurt. The curtain that splits our world in halves has been pried open. There is knowing, there is remembering, but these moments are different. We cannot flee from the pain we leave behind when we borrow archives. We look for meaning, patterns, process, proof. We find something else.
I don't know how to exist with the things I know. I don't think the violence truly ends. I think I'll keep walking my own path through it, find purpose, perpetually rediscover banality and revel in its relative simplicity.
But I am weaved from twisted love by the hook of the man who was supposed to hate the very idea of hurting me in the ways he did. He should have hated the very concept. He should have never even understood the extent of it to be possible. I don't have a reference point for what it was supposed to feel like, for him to be authentic in the role he had. I will never truly know.
Some heal by acknowledging who their abuser could have been, unmet needs, and what love is supposed to look like coming from them. Truth is, I don't want anything. No change or replacement makes any sense. I cannot approximate what it would be like for my captor to truly love me. I prefer to sit with the finality of his hate for me, because the genuineness breaks any illusion apart. I will never find a way to empathize with him or his role.
I know I can love. It'll be despite the man who taught me intimacy backwards. To recoil at love and sink into blurry violence out of habitual fear. Love is new. And undoing terrible lessons is an arduous task.
My skin is covered in a thin glaze, and I'm afraid to become see-through.
I'm hoping its iridescence tucks me in a few more times.