Liberation

11/07/2022

You moved to the hills, settled into the trees and the Appalachian like a lurking monster, and just like that, things went back to the way they were for you. The way they were supposed to be. You were othered and alone and that is what makes sense for you. We never talked about all the terrible things you did to me and they settled to the ground like dust that never seems to get wiped away and you looked right over them. It is an uncomfortable feeling and sometimes I think you recognize it too. I look at you from a distance and I ran away to the ocean. It took opposite plains of the earth to separate us and I don’t think we ever should have been together in the first place. It went against nature and it was so catastrophic. You destroyed me over and over and when I finally woke up from the haze I did not miss you I felt liberated.

I wonder sometimes if you wake up and think of me. Am I just something you are embarrassed of? I think you minimize me and you pretend you did not care or that you do not miss me because there is guilt twisting away at you and you cannot own up to what you did, but it makes you want to crawl out of your skin. It makes me want to crawl out of my skin.

I never told anyone except for Ayden that night what you had done. Putting it on paper, into words, it seems so wrong to admit. You raped me.

Thinking of you it feels so wrong, and you felt so wrong to me. You felt like a parasite that infested me and grasped me in total envelopment and I could not get away from. I never loved you and I know that know. And I know that I thought I did. I have never missed you except for once and mostly you make me want to reach inside my skull and peel out of the parts of me that remembers the things you did. I don’t hate many people, but I think I hate you. My brain was in a haze and you took advantage of me.

I remember the way I used to panic around my friends when you were there. Any wrong move, glance, joke, words at all, would be dooming. If I talked too much, made too many jokes, looked too friendly, did the wrong things.

You come to me in my dreams and your eyes pierce me with the harrowing gaze. Blue and dead, as I forget your voice, your face, your smell, but never your eyes. I will always remember your eyes and they come back to me in the farthest hours of the night. They stare into my soul and they jolt me from my sleep, and you only in my dreams when I am alone in them.

8 months of my life felt like nothing and it felt like the shortest most unimportant time in the world, but I think I have buried so much of what happened with us, because I struggle to remember it. I do not look back at old photos and when I have to I scroll very fast through the ones you are in. You remind me of a dark watch tower and you stuck out like a thumb.

Does it ever haunt you the way it haunts me?