Bleed You Out

His face at first just ghostly. That's not true. He wasn't ghostly until so much later. After I'd already fallen in love with him and given my heart and body away to someone so much worse - because he was there, because he was interested in that deliciously toxic sort of way, because you were dying and I couldn't touch you and nobody saw me and watching you pale was turning me ghostly. All the pale grey concrete that exists inside me now is a product of that time and having to just stand there and work there and focus on sales there and teach cuban motion and proper frame and down-up-up while you died in slow motion in front of me.

And I had to keep up my well-dressed smile, my Coco Chanel illusion, my smile. While he assaulted me. While you fell apart like wet paper, only ever looking at me with sad eyes that said more to me that one day on the benches than your words ever did. Let's not do that, one of the last things you said to me and the closest you ever came. I loved you, I gave myself to him. Maybe that's the kernel of shame, black like a cinder, that lives at the bottom of this story? Shame-filled kernel, remnant of that volcanic time in my life. That volcano. That made - I don't think me hungry for life but scared of life - I think my body. It made my body scared. The way the Wolf dismissed my nos as much as Kenn turned more ghostly every time I saw him. And no one talked to me about that, so here's what I internalized:

You can never trust your body. The more radiant you are, the more something in this world wants to take it from you. Cut you down. Bleed you out. Turn you ghostly, just to show you that it can. 

Boys are the same way, I know that now.

So-called men, too.

This came out when I gave my body a voice inside Body Writers, my somatic writing and healing circle. Learn to give your body a voice here.