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To The Girl Who Couldn’t Say No (1/2)

Samantha Rose

You can still see his handprints crawling down your delicate skin no matter how hard you scrape at them.

Wash and scrub your insides out with soap;
guilt was never stainless when it met the fabric of your body.

Fool me once, fool me twice, the third time doesn’t matter. Or the forth. Or the fifth.
You tell yourself that it’s not like you weren’t used to it by now; as if that really made everything okay.

Silence. You were silent.
No one ever listens when you speak, no one would have listened if you screamed!
And you did, every night your face fell to your pillow.

And you twist your outsides inward; hide in the safety of your own inner prison, locked inside with the company of every bad thing he ever did to you.
But at least he can’t reach you behind cold steel bars. No one can.

That didn’t stop him, though,
No, he continued to tear off your clothes and claw away your flesh every waking moment until it was no longer yours;


he drained you of the life dancing in your eyes that still sometimes flashes when you see your little brother or watch the sun set behind the Oregon pines.
But you’re different now.

Does he know that every night you dream about the things you refuse to feel in the daylight?
And oh how he licked his teeth after he swallowed you almost whole.

Almost whole, because you know you aren’t gone completely.
You are not the sand at the bottom of the hourglass drained by his thieving hands.
You stole yourself back.

And I see you now.
Stars twirl in your eyes,
Light performs a pirouette upon their deep brown surface.

Will you ever know, love, that it wasn’t your fault?
You don’t have to say a word; you never had to say a word.

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