the night the stars fell - poetry collection

graves

i will never forgive myself for laying in the grave you dug me. i was so complacent. so okay with pretending to be dead. i gave up on myself and what could have been. i was so stuck wishing to not be a victim that i made you feel it was okay. that i pulled my own coffin shut, but not before handing you the hammer, nails, and giving you my unspoken blessing. no last words. no memories. no note. i accepted my claustrophobic box for ten months. when you finally came to unearth me, i couldn't remember what had happened. why we weren't close. and i wanted nothing more than to be insufferably attached to you. i was drawn to you. your incredible pull over me. all the gravity in the earth was tying me to you and i couldn't be happy enough to breath your air. you rescued me from my grave, and though i had the oddest feeling in the back of my mind, you were my sun and i was your venus, longing to be closer. and then like a sack of bricks it hit me, with your dick pressing into the back of my spine as on lookers urged you to give me space, it was you. you were the one who built my coffin, dug my grave, forced me in, and persuaded me to hand you the hammer and nails. you were the one who made me feel so horrible, so at fault for your assaulting me, that i couldn't even be honest with myself and admit to my own soul what you did until two years later. and i sit everyday as i battle my primary emotion of fear. perpetual fear that one day you'll come back. one day you'll be angry. you'll know that i know what you did and you'll try to keep me quiet. the perpetual fear that any strange male i pass could be you or be like you. could force me, grab me, touch me. you make me feel like a stranger in my own body. like my soul doesn't belong here and her true vessel died long ago. a wandering spirit who will never find her home, instead she lays in empty graves hoping to find the self she lost in mine.