Can't Even Count The Number Of Times I Desperately Hoped My Abuser Would Die So I Could Be Free, And

The room is vividly flat this morning - It has been for a month now. The colours jump, the shapes merge. Plastic-partner shifts beside me, her chest rising and falling with each breath. My hand moves against her cheek; the soft mask gives under my fingers, strands of hair curling around my thumb. She opens her eyes, eyelids fighting against the heaviness of sleep and the edges of her mouth curling up at the corners in a drowsy smile.

I think I’m a ghost, I say.

Her thoughts churn groggily behind her eyes.

Ghosted, what? Baby, don’t worry, she replies. Don’t worry.

Her words trail off at the end and she lifts her hand to hold mine, plastic-palm meeting translucent skin, clasped together. Warmth. Her eyes shutter close again, breath deepens.

I’m a ghost, and you’re not real.

Out of her gaze I dissipate into the room, unmoving with the walls and the sloping light; the potted fern withering in the corner.

It is some time later and a blank page is sitting expectantly in front of me, the blinking cursor counting down the seconds. Demands of the living bind me. Deadlines and self-care and chores, like unfinished business to tie the soul. Let me wander, let me haunt. Plastic-partner slides a cup of coffee to me with a sympathetic slant to her eyes.

Thought you might need this, she says. You can do it.

It’s too hot when I drink it, just seconds past scalding. It burns down my throat and the warmth spreads from my chest. My feet slip through the chair legs they were resting on, tilting me forwards, untethered. Looking down at the page, my hands move to write. They write:

To the living concerned: My acquaintances, my friends, my family. I am a ghost now. Please don’t expect too much of the remaining.

First piece in a while, been thinking about death a lot. I still have no idea how to write poetry but putting words on paper helps vent I guess?

///

Today I’m feeling that animal-trap panic

Leg crushed and facing down the barrel of a gun type panic

The type you feel when you know there’s no escape

Slow creep of despair that steals the breath away

Adrenaline to run, run, run, live to breathe another day

Staring down that barrel and knowing

There’s nowhere to go but forwards

And your feet are moving

I’m feeling that animal-trap panic, watching

As my dad trudges and my mum struggles, tooth and claw

And we all know that the path is set

Carved deep into the ground and no diversions ahead

Look how beautiful the earth is in front of you

Or don’t, it won’t change the course

Can you focus on the patterns while the guns sound

I’m stepping forwards

Feeling that animal-trap panic

When I walk into the room he’s already puffed-up wide-eyed scared

Looking like he’s seen god at the bottom of a bottle

I ask him what’s wrong and he shakes

Shakes his head

There’s something that neither of us want to say.

It’s on the horizon

Ground-shaking, dead-waking, alarms wailing as it pushes closer

He’s stuck in its path and in that body-freeze

Ready to be struck

I’m laughing in time with the rumble and staring down from behind the wheel

Wondering if the bottle or the god will save him first

I walk into the room.

"you mean something to me" passed reverently between strangers, friends and lovers in this wide, chaotic world, where reaching happens only in the darkness with the trust there may be, possibly, someone reaching back

Grace

I’ve been trying to grow from the fallout.

I masked so long, I burned my life down.

It took you with it when I threw the first match,

And in the fire, losing you forever,

There was no coming back from that.

I never knew what to say,

But you’re still on my mind every day.

I sit at the spot where I saw you last,

Praying for healing from the past.

I tried to be who they wanted me to be,

But it was too much—I had to be free.

I never believed in myself enough,

Too soft for love, too hurt to be tough.

I did a lot of things and lived to fix that,

Sending clever messages, hoping you’d text back.

I didn’t mean for things to go so far,

Always left to deal with things on my own, scarred.

My family left me battered and bruised,

And the world left me feeling used.

Somehow I got lost along the way,

Never knew how to trust, or whose hand to take.

It’s easy to say I’m fucked in the head,

But I’ve learned to give myself grace instead.

I’ve grown from a lot of the things I’ve said,

though you may never forgive me,

I’ll try forgiving myself instead.

Another silly story for another day of being loosely tethered to this word

Ghost stares in the mirror and wonders if it should shave its hair down to the roots. Wonders if the sheen would shock the living or make it that much more invisible, stripped down to a bedsheet with hollow black circles to stare from. It puts down the razor.

Ghost watches with eyes at the back of its skull. It drifts into town, lingers on the bridge above the train station. Feels haunted by visions of laying on the tracks, staring up at the stars and the pale gulls circling above. Warm summer nights. Fog hangs heavy over the town; a train thunders through into the void.

A man in a striped scarf smiles a greeting through his thick beard. As he passes his hand catches a flaring corner of the bedsheet, rips it away. Ghost is left bare in the wake of his footsteps, watching the sheet descend like a parachute into the fog. Exposed now, wearing wounds like windows, Ghost continues into town. Smiles waveringly in greeting to each person it passes.

Fawn

They say I stood too still.

That my silence was permission,

that my softness was an open door,

that the way I froze beneath his hands

was proof I never fought.

But have they ever seen a deer at dusk,

caught in the cruel glare of something larger,

something faster, something that will not stop?

The way its breath shallows,

its legs lock,

its body forgets how to run?

They only understand teeth and fists,

only respect the ones who make a scene,

as if survival is a battle cry,

as if fear has a single shape.

But I was made for quiet woods,

for dappled light and safe distances.

And when the world came roaring toward me,

I did what prey has always done—

I disappeared inside myself

and prayed the night would pass.

The deer does not know how to say no.

Its tongue was never shaped for pleading,

never meant to beg for mercy

from the lurking beasts that decide its fate.

So how can you expect me to speak,

to force a word from lips gone still,

When the eyes before me do not see a person-

only the thrill of a body that won’t run?

-S.G

Just a really small vent piece, might go back to expand it later and make it into a full story. TW: Self harm/body horror

I unzip myself starting from the eyes, catching my eyelashes between my fingertips and ripping down. It is always difficult during this process of shedding to ignore the parts of the skin that I despise. The way it bulges and folds scatters my brain in panic to see. Tonight I feel wild with the need to get it off me, to not have to carry the burden of it, like an ill-fitting suit that itches with every movement. That fucking itchiness, always there, makes me want to scream. Sometimes it makes me weep. Tonight it makes me so eager to tear the skin off me that I do tear it accidentally, forming a thin line that wells up red after a second. In my itchy impatience I wait until I’m free to stitch the rip back together, guilty, knowing each red line acts as an arrow to point me out as a freak to others. I've seen the way they stare. They can go fuck themselves, I snarl now, knowing I won’t feel so confident when their eyes are scanning my skin, their lips curling. Problems for later. So many problems. I hang it up on a coat hanger and the head lolls down, eye sockets so empty they threaten to swallow me into their darkness. I close the closet door. I will open it again tomorrow morning.