Shame erases needing my own little world to stay in. I don’t feel pointless when I’m around you. You don’t get angry either. I still count my years because I need to, I don’t know what you do. There’s always something. A little thing, unmentioned. Trigger moments, I can’t believe I talk about it. Here, and again, and touch me please.
I was in the shower, enveloped in heat. I remembered being cold. I remembered taking the pills and my fingers turning blue. A different room, another life. Teeth chattering fit to break. The water turned on so hot, so hot, not hot enough. I burned myself, crouching in water, dying. Watching out the open door for someone who wouldn’t come to me. Smoking in the basement, probably more important. This is devotion.
I was at school when they stole me. My father had broken down the two inch door and the cops had come down. A woman in a skirt who was too fake for me to like her, she came to my classroom and tried to take my hand. The principal told me to get into her car and I was quiet. I was trying to remember every word said, evaluate and plan.
He tried to hit me and I got away. Slammed my knee into his belly and twisted under his arm to the door. I wanted to sit a moment in the hall and catch my breath, but I knew that would be stupid. My neighbor wasn’t answering her door, she probably heard the one sided yelling, the crash as I ducked thrown dishes. I sat on the street a few blocks away. There were stairs there, and a fountain, the open courtyard of some apartment building. I had nowhere else to go.