Moona-257 - Things Ive Lost On The Way Here

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.

me, after going five days feeling good: maybe…I am… Recovered™…?

me, crashing down on a trigger the very next day: oh

things my abuser has tried to take away from me but failed:

1) Love in the form of sunflowers and surprise dinners and intertwined fingers. Romance and deep kisses, warm and safe. Dancing and giggling with him to Lily Allen. Kissing him and wondering what I did to deserve a body so soft, a love so raw and honest.

2) Love in the form of looking after this heavy body, even when it doesn’t look after me back. Face masks, showers and brushing through my matted hair, knotted like a unkempt garden. Dragging myself to therapy and loving all the charred parts of me. Loving me flawed, loving me regardless, loving me unconditionally, loving the me that survived.

3) Love in the form of a best friend. Nights spent sleeping next to her, nights spent crying into her lap, nights spent singing at the top of our lungs. She loves me silently, knows me when I’m down, knows me when I’m up. She doesn’t love me different, even with all the flaws.

4) Love in the form of family, with their misguided love and tentative support. Love in the form of my mother’s perfume and food she tells me to eat even when I feel I don’t deserve it. Weeks spent in hospital, bringing me my favourite food in the ward. Love in the form of her imperfection and how I wouldn’t change it for the world.

5) Love in the form of music, of dancing around in my room to the anthems of my youth. Of belting it out as loud as my lungs will allow. Songs I’ve cried to, laughed to, kissed to, lost to. Songs that held me up and gave a melody to all the hurt.

6) Love in the form of the poet in me. On my best days, she is all that I am. On my worst days, she is all that I want to be.

7) Love in the form of hope. A love that screams I made it. A love that believes it happened. Recovery has finally, finally begun to taste sweet.

“In a shaky voice, he said: bring me back to you, or bring me back to myself. don’t leave me standing in between.”

something so quiet about his kiss, so secretive. his mouth wide open, swallowing truths and honey and hushed moans. hands that render me silent to everything, weak at the knees and falling head first into something so soft. something that’ll break my fall. passionate love that is not loud or arrogant. a love that beckons me towards it with little more than a whisper.

womanhood is so divine. the world attempting to desecrate and compartmentalise it only makes me realise how holy my body is. every scar and curve and pore and hair. there is genesis between my legs. godliness. life that brings life. how dare you attempt to spit upon scripture. how dare you attempt to destroy something you can’t touch.

“They’re all angels.”

— Keanu Reeves when asked what type of girls he likes x

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.

Artist Luo Li Rong

turning lonely into angry and angry into occupied was a coping mechanism for so long for me. I mean, what else was I supposed to do with all this empty space inside me, hollowed from the inside out by my own mind? I tried to lobotomise myself, tried to extract all the bad like a field doctor without supplies on the battlefield: improvising, desperate, bloody- willing to do anything to just make it stop.

What is the word for a building that is on fire and that building is ruined and gone and everyone else can feel the effects of the smoke and the heat and that building is not a building but a person and that person is the i in my poetry, except it’s my real body that aches. The depression was physical just as much as it was mental.

All that destruction, pain, all the hollowness my illness brought. The “I can’t sleep but I’m so fucking tired”, “I can’t come into school today because the world scares me and I haven’t showered in weeks” and “I’m so sad and so numb” and “im sorry I have to cancel on you but I just can’t face the day”. I felt like I hurt people more than I hurt myself.

It’s hard to forget that part of my life, sometimes it feels like all the darkness never left. It still creeps on me, on days where I’m too tired or haven’t eaten. And I still write about it in the present tense. It’s still here. still here.