My Bed For One Feels So Empty Without You Here. Come Over, Let’s Eat Shitty Chinese And Watch Bad Tv

[Softly but with a lot of feeling] fuck

every time I talk about my own abuse for the sake of justice or awareness, all the words punch the back of my throat, a heavy thumping that spills from my mouth like the ugly mess it was. it’s still so painful and emptying and numbing all at the same time. It feels like I spoil the conversation, that I’m being uncouth or impolite. my story has no place anywhere.

a glass just empty, full of unoccupied space. a head tangled with words. I’m still confused about the concept of justice. and love. and forgiveness. it just feels unfair. just feels so wrong to make my own body’s safety into a movement or a form of activism. I don’t want to be loud or strong or empowered, I just want to be safe.

this world, full of its misogyny and hatred towards women, doesn’t help. The vilification of victims in the media makes me feel even smaller. the internalisation of misogyny, undermining my own pain because of my body’s “crimes” doesn’t help either.

my voice sometimes doesn’t feel like my own. my body never feels like it belongs to me. all this activism and anger and pain and I still can’t shake the feeling.

I worry about other girls. I worry about their voices being stolen not only by their abusers, or society but also by themselves.

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?

altogether too empty to really quite exist. not pretty enough to make people stop and stare but just attractive enough to make a boy fall for the spark in my eyes. I feel like half a person, a waxing gibbous moon. had the potential to be something wonderful. don’t want to be normal or ordinary but I really am nothing special. that’s the curse of living I guess. you gotta live with the fact that you won’t be an elvis or a bowie or a keats.

Men hold up a baby saved from a pile of rubble. Damascus, Syria, 2014

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

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

am I condemned to a life of longing? seeing you laugh makes me go all nervous. watching your eyes light up as your grin threatens to shatter your cheekbones and the way the sunlight hits your hair in the summer as you twirl and twirl and twirl.

or the way your breath forms a cloud around ur mouth and condenses into the chilly night air in the winter. i’ve watched and witnessed and drowned in all the tiny things you do. and god, I’ve fallen in love with each of ur subliminal actions. each tiny quiver that your body makes. it fills me with want. i want. i long for you.

is it going to be like this forever? am I condemned to a life of longing? I would throw myself off the edges of your hipbones under the covers and drown in the tiny rivers under the translucent skin of ur wrists or sin in the holiness of your sweet kiss.

holy holy holy. if god had seen the way your eyes light up with happiness when you see me or the way your hair swings behind you like telephone wires in the breeze as you walk ahead of me he would have not written that girls should not lay with girls. honeyb, you are the most religious thing I’ve ever come close to. moans like a choir, hands clasped together in wanting.

i am condemned to a life of longing.

Tracey Emin