Work Text:
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Sometimes I stay under the stream of water until my fingers prune and the steam blurs the entire bathroom, trying to let the heat tear away a layer of skin that doesn’t belong to me. But water is innocent; it only cleans the surface, only caressing what the world sees. It doesn’t reach that deep place, beneath the muscles and nerves, where the disgust has settled like a silent parasite. I dry myself roughly, almost with rage, hoping the friction of the towel will erase what the soap could not, but the sensation persists. It’s always there.
It is a filth that has nothing to do with dust or sweat, but with an invisible footprint he left marked behind. The cruelest part of it all is that time passed, and death even took his trace from this world, but my cells seem to have a better memory than justice. In the silence of the night, or even in the middle of a sunny day, my body betrays me. I feel his hands. I feel the weight of his presence as if the air grew thick and trapped me all over again. It is an invasion that never ends, a tactile echo screaming at me that I am still his, that I am still that used object he chose to desecrate.
I wonder how much longer I will have to wear this victim’s uniform under my clothes. I look in the mirror and I don’t see the woman others see; I see shattered glass that someone tried to glue back together clumsily. And then the disgust hits me, a cold knot rising from my stomach and settling in my mouth. I convince myself that I am repulsive, that if people knew what I carry, they would turn away for fear of being stained by my story.
And then there is the weight of the honesty I cannot deliver. I look at my boyfriend, and his kindness hurts like an open wound. He holds me with a tenderness so pure it makes me want to cry out of shame. He tells me I am beautiful, that I am light, and every kind word feels like extra weight in my backpack of secrets. I feel like an impostor, a criminal hiding a rotten truth in the middle of her garden. I feel like I’m lying to him every time I kiss him back, because I don’t tell him that at that very moment, I am fighting not to feel the other touches—the ones that hurt, the ones that make me feel small and dirty.
Guilt is a shadow that haunts me. Guilt for not being stronger, guilt for not being able to forget, and now, guilt for not trusting the person who loves me most. But how do I explain to him that my body is a battlefield? How do I tell him that sometimes, when he touches me, I have to close my eyes so I don’t lose myself in a memory that burns me?
I wish I could empty myself completely. To open a crack in my chest and pull out all that past—every sensation of abuse, every ounce of filth I feel covering me. I want to go back to that point in my childhood where my skin only knew the sun and the breeze, where no one had laid their hands on me to steal my peace. I want to stop feeling used. I want to stop feeling like I am "less" because someone else was a monster.
I keep waiting for the day I can bathe and, finally, feel the water reaching all the way down. The day my skin stops remembering what it shouldn't, and I can finally inhabit my own body without feeling like I am sharing my space with a ghost that fills me with loathing..