A poem that describes a woman who is abused by a man that causes her trauma.
Trauma does not wear a name tag.
Every time I try to tell a therapist
or a friend or an audience what
happened to me, I cross off a
new term in permanent marker.
Saying the word “abuser” has always
left my heart in a cold sweat. Adding
a determiner only makes everything
worse. My abuser. That just makes
every window inside of me shatter,
makes all of the dogs howl, makes
every train blast my eardrums into
a new millennium.
I am always looking for the quickest
way to tell someone who needs
to know. How fast can I say,
I was 13 and looking for a friend
online? Or, I was afraid to tell him
no?
Or even:
I don’t know what his hands felt like,
only what they could type out
in a room only lit by the green light
of a laptop screen. But he knows
what my body looks like wearing
nothing but the mirror. He could
identify every part of me on a table.
How does that make you feel?
Because it makes me feel like I need
to be believed.
Goddamn it, I wish I could be
a good survivor. I wish I could
have a memory that is not full
of broken cameras and area codes.
If every word I use to try and
explain my past makes me want
to recoil back into the comfort
of flight-or-freeze, how will
I ever get past the beginning
of it all?
A determiner makes everything
worse. My abuser.
The thing is, I don’t want to think of him
as mine, because he always thought of me
as his.
- Lydia Havens -
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| A painting of a crying woman... |
Painting by (yet) unknown creator
Copyright 2015 - Berlin-ArtParasites Facebook Page [Posted to Pitzviews Blogsite]
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