The Words

It started softly at first. Little words and instances, and small betrayals that left questions sticking in her mind like needles. Words that hit her skin like stones, leaving bruises that spread and scarred and left fear in their wake, words that kept her up at night.
Who I am? What am I doing here? And who are you?

The words start tumbling faster now, and come with twisted expressions of anger, bitterness, resentment and blame. It's taking her back to her childhood; the memories of disquiet and fear and always, always the blame. It's taking her back to the fear of speaking, the fear of being touched, ever. The fear of meeting someone's eyes. There is only anger around her. An atmosphere weighed down by secrets and the blush of blood rising into skin. And inside, nothing but emptiness and the echoes of something deeper, something that will never be undone.

There is a stranger asleep beside me. Someone I no longer understand, who no longer understands me. I am afraid of their hands.

There will be moments where the words, and touch, will hurt her more than she remembered she could be hurt like that. Where fear obliterates everything in her mind, and she is frozen at the insistent hand on the shape of her, the words, the ignorance of what is being said or done, or the disregard of it. The soft pressure of the words "but you're always sick, so...", "it's like you don't love me". How she will speak of those echoes in her soul, they will talk, talk of her fear and pain. In soft words, she will be wrapped in cocoons of cotton 'love', held by gently uttered syllables of understanding, she will cry, they will talk again, she will cry again and speak of the fear; that fear; and she will be given

                       words.

Words like lullabies that make her begin again, make her feel safe. And seconds later, there will be those hands again, on her skin, on her thighs, insistent. And when she moves away, afraid, words like those buried with the past will be said again, in someone else's mouth; "It's like you don't love me". There will be fear; pure fear, like the kind she felt as a child. Fear of safety, fear of going home. There will be 100 reasons to leave the house early, to stay away as long as she can, to disappear, because she wants to leave, but has nowhere to go.

It tears into her marrow like a post-mortem done with sounds, with the shape of someone's lips, timbre as well-placed as scalpels moving softly under light.

She will overhear hushed coversations in low tones outside a dark garage, about her, her body, how "crazy she is". Words said in secret spite to friends over the telephone in the twilight; "She's just a crazy person". She will overhear laughter about how easy she is to control. She will see a face change; gentleness fading like sand dripping through her fingers; twisted like a mask of alien expressions as words are thrown.

There will be the feeling of turning back into a ghost. There will be sorrow swallowing her bones and lifting its head to drink from her soul with lips that cannot drink their fill.

When she leaves, all trust will be broken forever, an umbilical cord to a person that may never have existed, cut clean in severence as their anger lashes her with the lowest road taken; words chosen for the maximum hurt they would inflict. They hit her like knives, and cause internal bleeding, and she will bleed inwardly for a long, long time, reopening wounds of a past that she was desperate to heal.

She chose this, after all. They always tell her that she chooses it. She is everything they ever told her she was: worthless, selfish, she chose to be this way. She chose her past. It is her fault.
You chose this. You wanted this. If you really loved me...

Then, the betrayals keep coming; whispered intelligences to others, crowded shadows of people who know too much What do they know? How much did you tell them? Standing too close, and pushing her to the edge, where she wants to jump, to

                        let go

of the scars inside her that she cannot face, the scars that were reopened because "you don't love me enough". She can't breathe for the fear, despite the happiness she'd been finding since her life has started again, the love she's found and the happiness of being free; the feeling of safety again.

They wanted to make her hurt. They wanted...
They're only words afterall.