moona-257
love you all it means the world anybody reads my stuff!!!!
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Latest Posts by moona-257
a love letter as a hug, as your head in my lap, as the romance of room 56, with the lights turned off. there have been so many nights i wished i was crawling into bed beside you, so many late night library sessions where i wished you were across me, eyes glued to your laptop, days where i wished i was reaching across the mattress to rest against your tenderness, the sweet softness of you.
does he want you for what you are or does he want you for what you give
borrowed time, green eyes and sunshine. oh how these river currents move like your body on top of mine. like the quiet disappointment of your wandering eye. how i could live, die and breathe in this moment, experience eighty years of heaven and hell with you. the sun on my skin feels like a kiss. steady, lover. stay with me through the summer.
lover, breathe with me in between all the seconds. the slow rise and fall of your rib cage, and the quiet hum of your pulse underneath crumpled bedsheets. spill your lifeline between those saccharin lips onto my body. time spent apart and together, sighing in the bathtub with our naked bodies and glasses of wine. kiss me here and here and here darling. turn my body into a love letter, sign your name onto my inner thigh.
salting wounds with poetry, and counting losses with a pen that’s run dry. tomorrow will be one year since you hurt me for the first time (oh how quickly time flies). and it angers me that everyone can still read your name in between these lines, that your pulse is still the rhythm of my poetry (and my life).
how casually you haunt me, old friend. i am no longer afraid of the memories you left on my skin (though i moved cities to escape them) so perhaps i can call this a year of growth. but is it really, when i spent months trying to fight the urge my bones had to rearrange themselves into a different woman?
the 29th was hot last year, and it is hot today too. but i’m not that girl who was complacent in her own destruction anymore, no. ive left the demolition site for good.
now, i kiss the girl i was and i thank her for staying alive, hold her and say that i’m proud she survived.
My name is I LOVE YOU and all of this is so new and bright. How lovely it is to have you, sunshine, after all this rain! Heaven lies at your feet and the sunrise breaks in your eyes. You are hot flashes and lightning. How the warmth in your palms cuts down my mountain of empty. How I call this love. How I call this wanting.
My name is HOT, my name is SEXY, my name is I-REALLY-WANT-FUCK-YOU and that’s a compliment, right? You wrap your arms around my waist and murmur it under your breath. I let your maggot-filled observations wriggle into the blackening wound in my chest. Call it healing, call it medicine, and call it I’m-going-to-be-okay. My name is GIRLFRIEND now, my name is SWEETNESS, and my name is PERFECT.
My name is BABY and I am lying on the floor. The pain, the bloodstains and the harsh light, your body over mine and my name is NO. My name is STOP. My name is PLEASE SLOW DOWN. My name is I JUST WANTED A HUG. I am a shell of whatever I used to be- nothing more, nothing less. Let this be a funeral for whatever innocence I had left. Let this be my goodbye, my I-swear-I’ll-be-fine.
My name is blood and pain and baby-let’s-never-talk-about-this-again.
My name is N****. My name is BLACK. My name is AFRICAN and I flinch at your awful words. Your father will never know my name, and your mother will never judge me over dinner. I am dirt. I will never be your perfect, goodly, godly girl. I am too brown to really mean anything. There are no riches here. Nothing grows here. The earth is hungry here.
My name is DAMAGED GOODS and I wonder how you could ever love a girl like me. You say it over the phone, your tongue lashing from between your teeth. I listen for the love in your voice like a paramedic listens for breath. I hear nothing. It is dead. My name is UNLOVABLE. My name is WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO DO THIS. All that blood pumping and rushing in my veins are only my own.
My name is I AM SORRY. All those apologies spill over the floor like an overturned drink. You watch me clean it all up, Mary Magdalene at your feet. Retribution for whatever sin I take on next.
My name is CRAZY. Everything is my fault and none of it is yours. I agree, my lungs bloodletting as I wonder how you are so perfect. I betrayed my own body, my own soul for this and for you. Lover, call this a suicide. Watch how I gag on all this blame, and choke. Watch me and grin. My name is GOOD GIRL. My name is I FORGIVE YOU. My name is OBEDIENCE. My name is I LOVE YOU LIKE THIS.
I learn to be frightened of you like plants learn to be frightened of gravel. My name is STUPID and WOMEN LIKE YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR PLACE. My name is SHUT UP. My name is DECLINED CALLS. My name is I DON’T LOVE YOU ANYMORE.
My name is IT WILL GET BETTER but I face the wall with my music turned up high, the rotting memories crawling up my throat like spiders. I still see you in the corner of my eye.
My name is ___________________________________
I can’t remember who I was before this
I can’t remember who I was before you.
Complacency masked by the gentle glove of understanding,
(my friends always did say I was too accommodating).
And you- this poor, poor boy who was caught in the middle of a drama.
(You call it a drama, I call it the thing that makes me feel unsafe in my own skin)
“You cannot expect me to throw away 5 years of friendship”
I said okay, okay.
I did not want the assault to take away my friendships after it took
The deep appreciation I used to have for this body
My smile
My life.
But today I saw you give the man that raped me a big hug.
You know- those big i-missed-you man hugs?
I felt the anger tear across my palms, two fists ready to meet the drywall.
How could you.
You know what he did.
You know what he took from me.
And I realise you didn’t care.
Because it was not your body he turned inside out.
It was not your tongue he ripped from your throat.
You give him a hug full of familiarity and love.
I don't want to forgive you.
I don’t want to pretend it’s all alright.
I won’t roll over and accept it this time.
The closest I’ve ever been to a crime scene is the stairwell where I had my body ripped in two
(my mind still wanders there, sifting for clues).
Your Honour- I introduce Exhibit A:
Torn underwear, a bruised pelvis and a mouth full of silence
In a plastic bag for the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.
To the Defence: look into my eyes and tell me I’m lying- please,
Because I can’t process the clockwork murder that man made of my own body.
I carry hot pink pepper spray like lipstick-
does that prove fear for you?
Is the fact that I can’t eat without throwing up indication enough for the horrors I endured?
Will you please protect me?
Because I can’t sleep anymore.
I can’t eat anymore.
I lost myself to him.
Exhibit B: let the jury read a phone full of messages,
Coerced consent,
“I’ll leave you if you don’t do this”, he said.
My mother asks me what I stayed for and all I can muster is a croaky
“I loved him, mama”
Ladies and gentlemen-
Won’t you pry inside me like he did?
Follow me down the tunnel he dug between my legs?
Believe me when I say I am terrified.
Icy blue eyes,
Claws for hands and
Lips that shushed me when I screamed.
Exhibit C: I offer me.
Can’t you see my body is a funeral pyre now?
Can’t you see that this is the scene of the crime?
How humiliating this process is.
How it makes me wish I never said anything at all.
what if he loves her the way he refused to love me?
Why didn’t you leave, my mother and my friends and his friends asked me and I wish I could give them all an answer because it’s been months and I’m still not too sure. I can’t really work it out because it’s not like he ever hit me. In fact- maybe it was my fault, the way I swallowed the words that spilled over the floor until I was sick. I carefully clipped admissions of pain into jokes about how love feels like drowning, whispered softly to my friends, “so fucked up” as if this wasn’t the life I was living. I walked around with my jaw clenched because he was safe enough, right? And it’s not like yelling or insults ever killed anyone (it is bad to have this body. it takes up too much space.) I heard someone call me “emotionally delicate” and I would cry but there isn’t really anything to cry about. that’s the joke of it. so what that he said he’d make me do it even if I didn’t want to? so what he’d recoil when I argued and say “you’re so annoying when you panic”. There was nothing beautiful there, nothing soft. No red flags, no warning signs- just an empty carcass and dirt. My heart like a rotten peach (how it is all so unbearable). He has a new girlfriend now and they kiss and hold hands and something inside me breaks (maybe she was soft in ways I never was, maybe it was always me). Is this how love works? Was it always supposed to be this way?
I’m back in a stairwell. blue faced and weak
and weak
and weak.
It isn’t getting easier.
sunshine lover. body shaped like the word devour and I’m hungry, so hungry. sunshine lover. come lay in the garrets of my heart. let me kiss your wrists. let me love you. let me take all of you for myself. won’t you come linger, love?
winter lover. I’ll never be your snow covered sweetheart, wrapped up in a white sheet. you’ve devoured every aching corner of my heart. winter lover. all my poetry and writing is yours, though I didn’t want them to be. winter lover. cut my wrists. staple them to a cross. I am nothing more than yours.
come teach me why flowers grow better with blood-based fertiliser. come bury me in the ripe plum of your body, tangle around me like ivy. see, im so tired of dragging around this empty casket of a mind. see, i know I shouldn’t but baby, I’m fucking hopeless over you.
see, I turn silent during sex. my voice buries itself in my throat like a messy bloodclot. how could I be anything other than passive anyway? anything other than silent? my abuser carries my voice around like his souvenir, has split my body in two and took one half with him. left me with skin I don’t recognise, a body that still mistakes warmth for war. i turn silent during sex. let his hands paint orchids on my neck, let his fingers climb up me in search of my secrets, let his body into mine until I have nowhere to put the bad memories. this body isn’t mine. I don’t think it ever will be.
how tragic we were. my therapist called it abuse last night. I don’t know how I didn’t see it. you would make me go on runs to lose weight and i’d say yes, anything for you. you’d guilt me into fucking you. call me fat and my body less desirable. how tragic it was. how I desperately wanted it to be perfect. how I watched everything we had disappear between my fingertips. I lost a part of me I thought I need. slowly. like baby teeth.
it was for the best. but it sure doesn’t feel like it.
you hurt me. convinced me that the light that possessed our bodies was liquid love. ruined me. all that brightness ruined me. i have holes in me now. darkness poking through my skin and seeping from my bones. haunted now.
it’s getting colder and I miss watching the condensation of your breath form and disappear in the air. the iciness of your blue eyes, the chill in your stare. winter boy, you said you never loved me. winter boy, I have so many questions: was it all real? why can’t you look me in the eye any more? how did you forget me that easily?
winter boy, how did our love get so cold?
I've nodded and being complicit in my own destruction, maybe more than I should have. because that was way easier than arguing about it, so much easier than just saying no because I am so used to the word falling on deaf ears. Our relationship wasn’t that bad, I say to my girlfriends. But I would close my eyes and leave my body and whisper to my bleeding heart: turn over, you don’t need to like it. god knows that’s not what he wants anyway. you just need to do it. close your eyes and lose yourself to him. do what he wants. do it. felt myself cower into nothingness. again.
I love the fact that you need to lean on me, a boy says.
He loved my vulnerability and how big I made him feel,
But would get annoyed if I’d call him in the midst of another anxiety attack,
Begging to know if he still loved me,
if he still wanted me.
He called me his broken little thing.
Wrote a play and in it I stabbed myself with a blade.
I would write him a suicide note thanking him for his bravery and his charm.
He finds me on the floor, cries over me and goes on to be a doctor,
It’s only now that I realise he never loved me.
He just loved the control.
You seem like the type that would happen anyway.
I smile politely and listen to him as he went on about how sexy he thought my vulnerability was.
My trauma a commodity, a mere accessory to him.
I am the saint in the stained glass window now.
I wonder if I’m the type when he kept his hands where they were even when I asked him to stop.
The way he mistook my shrinking for permission.
My fingertips were so thin then,
Pale, peeling skin and a wrecking ball in the empty space in my chest.
I wonder if I’m the type when a man I don’t know follows me home,
The way I tried to swallow the problem, to drop my throat into a whisper.
To survive by blending, by not being the victim,
Maybe I had always asked for it.
Maybe this just happened to girls like me.
You sure it wasn’t just a shitty relationship? He asks.
I answer the boy’s question with well-practiced silence.
Give into the chokehold of this quiet dehumanizing moment I had grown so used to by now.
Whisper to my body: you know what to do.
Succumb to the numbness, lose yourself to him all over again.
I remember seeing my abuser across the train platform
the way my silence met his.
the fear twisting itself between my ribs as he grinned at me,
asked if I missed him
I watched the anger flash across his face as my silence met his rage.
I got on the next train and physically collapsed,
had a panic attack that lasted an hour.
Didn’t speak for the rest of the day.
So you’re damaged goods, my ex boyfriend laughed after I told him about my abuse.
I laugh with him as I feel the silence catch in my throat.
He confirmed my fears:
That this body is worth nothing now.
It would never be desirable ever again.
Never told anyone how I locked myself out of my own body,
how I’d never be able to go back now.
Even if I did, what would be left?
How does the burnt forest learn to trust the sun again?
He was probably right,
All the nights I spent tearing at my skin,
Trying to reach something new,
Something that had yet to be touched by him,
Something pure.
feeling blue. like I tried to reach for something, something I felt my bones pop out of their sockets for, and it never existed in the first place. my nerve endings twisted around your name, my body tangled in your half empty desires. feeling like I’m drowning in the what ifs and unanswered questions. like. am I that easy to forget. did you ever really love me. was any of that real. were the last 8 months really that fucking empty. what a horrible mess we made, blue eyed boy. our love, a graveyard of everything we once promised each other
mustafa and I broke up today. My blue eyed boy is no longer mine. I expected tears to pour out of me, the ground to tear open, the sun to swallow herself with grief. but there is nothing. I feel nothing. he wasn’t the angel I thought he was, this picture perfect boy with a smile like gold. he was just a boy. screwed up and scared and flawed through and through.
said to me my body kept me with him. that passion overcame him and that’s he’s just a man. just a man. how could i expect him to be anything more. said to me the light in my eyes meant nothing to him. said he doesn’t see the point in staying. I felt the breath catch in my throat as we said goodbye at the edge of the river.
blue eyed boy. stay safe too.
angel-haired boy, your kisses fall on me like rain. with your shy smile and warm palms. ive slipped up and called you “baby”, crossing my fingers and hoping that you don’t think I’m crazy. angel-haired boy, turn to me and smile. speak to me in the language of lovers. let me kiss you till my lipstick turns your lips cherry red. angel-haired boy, won’t you sweeten this body like spring sweetens the air? walk over my grave, whisper my name. watch me rise from the dead to be yours again. in this life and the next.
baby I can’t bear the thought of letting you down. you’re the one I dress up for, the one I cry in secret for. i don’t call you when the world is crumbling because I want you to believe that I’m successful and beautiful and strong. whenever I love someone new, I hide every breakdown like a secret shame. I know if you found out how frightened I actually am, you’ll leave. they always do. believe me, lover. I know how this story goes.
my hair was wet and tangled, my clothes stuck to me like a second skin. your hands were reaching for me, desperate and frantic. but we’re laughing and splashing. you had dared me to jump into the lake and I had said, yes I’ll do it even if I can’t swim. what’s youth without a little death anyway? what’s life if we don’t test it’s limits? the lake was so cold but I loved feeling your body pull me from it. I loved knowing you’d always save me. I coughed and spluttered in between the giggles, shivering and shocked. you ask me if it hurts. it still does, my brown eyed boy. it still does.
and I think it always will.
you kiss the lake and catch sight of the moon in its reflection. feel yourself drowning in everything you were once proud of. lost boy, don’t you know? those who communicate with angels are already lost. it is not beautiful or brave. the way the water pulls you in and traps you in it’s embrace is tragic. where is the angel you were praying to now?