Isn’t it funny how you took the pieces of me I needed the most? How you severed all the invisible ways I needed in order to believe in love and connection. You poured cement over my spirit and walked away like nothing happened.

Isn’t it funny how I dissolve because I’m so scared when I try to remember–that I don’t, and when I speak the fragments, I smile?

The theft of my connection to my own body was left in the gravel after you shredded it with your body.

I want it back.

Because it’s not funny, or trivial, or anything other than words I still can’t say out loud.

When your body forgot how to behave like a gentleman, I lost the trust of any body. When your words stripped away my very last drop of self-esteem, I endlessly searched for my dignity in others’ words.

You must have forgotten that I was a human being. You must have thought I wouldn’t comprehend what happened. Maybe you perceived I was too inebriated. Maybe, you forgot altogether that we were friends.

Maybe.

My thoughts since then: I am careless, unintelligent, incapable, inadequate, ugly, gross, portly. Oh so portly.

You stole my ability to trust:

in the safety I need from caring embrace.

in myself.

in my body.

I waited 12 years to try to get safety, myself, and my body back as if I needed to return to the crime scene in order to begin to understand.

I waited a dozen years to try to find and piece together the broken synapses that misfire when I am touched. When I receive that desperately needed connection.

“You’re a 7 out of 10” my dad says, about my appearance. Isn’t your father supposed to say you’re a 10, even if it’s not true?

A 7 is a 70% which is not an A.

These things intertwine because I came back to that house and heard things like this and

Have never ever felt like I was enough.

7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,

Zero.

Zero is the number I am afraid I am and the number I wished to be one too many times.

How can anyone want to verbally or physically care for a zero?

I came back to that house and needed to be scooped up by a parent.

I need(ed) to know, to be sure, love for me in this destroyed body still existed.

-exists.