I want to speak. I want to shout and scream and cry, but most of all I want to speak. I want to shatter this suffocating silence – I dream of being free again. Back in a body that I own, one that I can sit with as long as I want, a body that’s not repulsive or used or fucking broken. I want to speak, and as I feel the words rising in my throat, my stomach turning sick, I think to myself ‘what would really happen if you spoke? Would you be as strong as them?’. The words sit so hot and heavy on my tongue - they taste like fear and freedom: hell and hope. Those words have power, and I am so afraid of it. One word and, once again, it would tear down the barricades, it would rip my life apart piece by piece and this precarious sense of stability would crumble from its delicate, delicate tower. And then I remember. I remember people spitting and swearing in my face, I remember all the ‘sluts’ and ‘whores’ and ‘what were you wearing’s’. I remember all the twisted ‘allegations’ and I remember all the fucking violence. Everything I ever knew was pulled from beneath my feet, every defence mechanism torn away - I was cracked open, vulnerable, with nothing protecting me from the brunt of the fall.I feel the shame crawling red up the back of my neck as the humiliation guts me, stuffs me, folds me inside out – they all know, they all know he fucked you, they all know, they all know you stupid, stupid bitch, they all fucking know. They all. Fucking. Know.Then I decided: not today. I swallow my words, feel the acidity slide bitterly back down my throat, I feel the weight of them sink back into the pits of my sickening stomach and I simmer in my pain. Alone.Too weak to confess, too weak to own up. Don’t forget that you’re a fucking liar.Then I decided: not again. Not yet. One day. One day ill speak but that day is not today. It is not tomorrow. I am silenced but it is only temporary, I am silenced but it is only for one short, short eternity. Please gods may my silence not be forever. I spoke once, I spoke even though I knew what could happen, I spoke even though I knew the risks. I spoke because I desperately needed someone to hear me, I spoke, and I spoke and it was all one eternal, unforgivable mistake and now I deserve nothing short of death. Just one of many shitty things my shitty self has done. And now I am back in silence again. Hushed up, pushed back, quieted. Shrunk, afraid and small. It is dehumanising, to watch your hope die, to watch your dreams fade into black as you live in a nightmare. It is degrading, it wears you down until there seems to be nothing left. It has you casting aside your humanity, simply to find a way to survive. It has you living in so much shame that the humiliation numbs to nothing, it has you doing anything and everything to relieve the pain, in one last desperate attempt to make it out alive. And yet, there is one thing I will not do. I will not die in silence, I will not die here, not now, not tomorrow. I swore to myself that I would survive, I will live through every day of fucking hell so that one day I will speak again. And next time there will be no more silence. I will speak and people will listen. I will make it out of here alive, and when I do, Ill have one hell of a story to tell.