things Ive Lost On The Way Here

love you all it means the world anybody reads my stuff!!!!

[moona-257]

hi :) my name is moona. I write (and paint!) and this is my poetry/prose blog. feel free to direct message me!! I am constantly in awe of love and how it has sweetened my life, which is why you’ll find a LOT of that shit here. I write about other things too, things that are personal to me and things I’m still learning to be okay with. I truly hope you find solace/healing/joy in my writing and if not, I just hope you can relate to some of it. I’ve found that words have the inimitable power to make us feel less lonely.

enjoy! <3

[moona-257]

and i would do anything for you to stay

[moona-257]

a love letter as a hug, as your head in my lap, as the romance of room 56, with the lights turned off. there have been so many nights i wished i was crawling into bed beside you, so many late night library sessions where i wished you were across me, eyes glued to your laptop, days where i wished i was reaching across the mattress to rest against your tenderness, the sweet softness of you.

[moona-257]

does he want you for what you are or does he want you for what you give

[moona-257]

oh you’re lovely at being the victim, aren’t you? pout your lips and say that you never knew what you did to me. held me like i meant something to you. broken glass jaw, splintered ash and telephone calls. oh how silly i am, oh how naive.

[moona-257]

borrowed time, green eyes and sunshine. oh how these river currents move like your body on top of mine. like the quiet disappointment of your wandering eye. how i could live, die and breathe in this moment, experience eighty years of heaven and hell with you. the sun on my skin feels like a kiss. steady, lover. stay with me through the summer.

[moona-257]

lover, breathe with me in between all the seconds. the slow rise and fall of your rib cage, and the quiet hum of your pulse underneath crumpled bedsheets. spill your lifeline between those saccharin lips onto my body. time spent apart and together, sighing in the bathtub with our naked bodies and glasses of wine. kiss me here and here and here darling. turn my body into a love letter, sign your name onto my inner thigh.

[moona-257]

salting wounds with poetry, and counting losses with a pen that’s run dry. tomorrow will be one year since you hurt me for the first time (oh how quickly time flies). and it angers me that everyone can still read your name in between these lines, that your pulse is still the rhythm of my poetry (and my life).

how casually you haunt me, old friend. i am no longer afraid of the memories you left on my skin (though i moved cities to escape them) so perhaps i can call this a year of growth. but is it really, when i spent months trying to fight the urge my bones had to rearrange themselves into a different woman?

the 29th was hot last year, and it is hot today too. but i’m not that girl who was complacent in her own destruction anymore, no. ive left the demolition site for good.

now, i kiss the girl i was and i thank her for staying alive, hold her and say that i’m proud she survived.

[moona-257]

My name is I LOVE YOU and all of this is so new and bright. How lovely it is to have you, sunshine, after all this rain! Heaven lies at your feet and the sunrise breaks in your eyes. You are hot flashes and lightning. How the warmth in your palms cuts down my mountain of empty. How I call this love. How I call this wanting. 

My name is HOT, my name is SEXY, my name is I-REALLY-WANT-FUCK-YOU and that’s a compliment, right? You wrap your arms around my waist and murmur it under your breath. I let your maggot-filled observations wriggle into the blackening wound in my chest. Call it healing, call it medicine, and call it I’m-going-to-be-okay. My name is GIRLFRIEND now, my name is SWEETNESS, and my name is PERFECT. 

My name is BABY and I am lying on the floor. The pain, the bloodstains and the harsh light, your body over mine and my name is NO. My name is STOP. My name is PLEASE SLOW DOWN. My name is I JUST WANTED A HUG. I am a shell of whatever I used to be- nothing more, nothing less. Let this be a funeral for whatever innocence I had left. Let this be my goodbye, my I-swear-I’ll-be-fine. 

My name is blood and pain and baby-let’s-never-talk-about-this-again.

My name is N****. My name is BLACK. My name is AFRICAN and I flinch at your awful words. Your father will never know my name, and your mother will never judge me over dinner. I am dirt. I will never be your perfect, goodly, godly girl. I am too brown to really mean anything. There are no riches here. Nothing grows here. The earth is hungry here. 

My name is DAMAGED GOODS and I wonder how you could ever love a girl like me. You say it over the phone, your tongue lashing from between your teeth. I listen for the love in your voice like a paramedic listens for breath. I hear nothing. It is dead. My name is UNLOVABLE. My name is WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO DO THIS. All that blood pumping and rushing in my veins are only my own. 

My name is I AM SORRY. All those apologies spill over the floor like an overturned drink. You watch me clean it all up, Mary Magdalene at your feet. Retribution for whatever sin I take on next. 

My name is CRAZY. Everything is my fault and none of it is yours. I agree, my lungs bloodletting as I wonder how you are so perfect. I betrayed my own body, my own soul for this and for you. Lover, call this a suicide. Watch how I gag on all this blame, and choke. Watch me and grin. My name is GOOD GIRL. My name is I FORGIVE YOU. My name is OBEDIENCE. My name is I LOVE YOU LIKE THIS.

I learn to be frightened of you like plants learn to be frightened of gravel. My name is STUPID and WOMEN LIKE YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR PLACE. My name is SHUT UP. My name is DECLINED CALLS. My name is I DON’T LOVE YOU ANYMORE. 

My name is IT WILL GET BETTER but I face the wall with my music turned up high, the rotting memories crawling up my throat like spiders. I still see you in the corner of my eye. 

My name is ___________________________________

I can’t remember who I was before this

I can’t remember who I was before you.

[moona-257]

Complacency masked by the gentle glove of understanding,

(my friends always did say I was too accommodating).

And you- this poor, poor boy who was caught in the middle of a drama.

(You call it a drama, I call it the thing that makes me feel unsafe in my own skin)

“You cannot expect me to throw away 5 years of friendship”

I said okay, okay.

I did not want the assault to take away my friendships after it took

The deep appreciation I used to have for this body

My smile

My life.

But today I saw you give the man that raped me a big hug. 

You know- those big i-missed-you man hugs?

I felt the anger tear across my palms, two fists ready to meet the drywall. 

How could you. 

You know what he did.

You know what he took from me.

And I realise you didn’t care.

Because it was not your body he turned inside out. 

It was not your tongue he ripped from your throat. 

You give him a hug full of familiarity and love. 

I don't want to forgive you. 

I don’t want to pretend it’s all alright.

I won’t roll over and accept it this time.

[moona-257]

The closest I’ve ever been to a crime scene is the stairwell where I had my body ripped in two

(my mind still wanders there, sifting for clues). 

Your Honour- I introduce Exhibit A: 

Torn underwear, a bruised pelvis and a mouth full of silence 

In a plastic bag for the ladies and gentlemen of the jury. 

To the Defence: look into my eyes and tell me I’m lying- please, 

Because I can’t process the clockwork murder that man made of my own body. 

I carry hot pink pepper spray like lipstick- 

does that prove fear for you?

Is the fact that I can’t eat without throwing up indication enough for the horrors I endured? 

Will you please protect me? 

Because I can’t sleep anymore. 

I can’t eat anymore.

I lost myself to him.

Exhibit B: let the jury read a phone full of messages, 

Coerced consent, 

“I’ll leave you if you don’t do this”, he said. 

My mother asks me what I stayed for and all I can muster is a croaky 

“I loved him, mama”

Ladies and gentlemen- 

Won’t you pry inside me like he did?

Follow me down the tunnel he dug between my legs?

Believe me when I say I am terrified. 

Icy blue eyes, 

Claws for hands and 

Lips that shushed me when I screamed. 

Exhibit C: I offer me. 

Can’t you see my body is a funeral pyre now? 

Can’t you see that this is the scene of the crime? 

How humiliating this process is. 

How it makes me wish I never said anything at all.

[moona-257]

again

[moona-257]

what if he loves her the way he refused to love me?

Why didn’t you leave, my mother and my friends and his friends asked me and I wish I could give them all an answer because it’s been months and I’m still not too sure. I can’t really work it out because it’s not like he ever hit me. In fact- maybe it was my fault, the way I swallowed the words that spilled over the floor until I was sick. I carefully clipped admissions of pain into jokes about how love feels like drowning, whispered softly to my friends, “so fucked up” as if this wasn’t the life I was living. I walked around with my jaw clenched because he was safe enough, right? And it’s not like yelling or insults ever killed anyone (it is bad to have this body. it takes up too much space.) I heard someone call me “emotionally delicate” and I would cry but there isn’t really anything to cry about. that’s the joke of it. so what that he said he’d make me do it even if I didn’t want to? so what he’d recoil when I argued and say “you’re so annoying when you panic”. There was nothing beautiful there, nothing soft. No red flags, no warning signs- just an empty carcass and dirt. My heart like a rotten peach (how it is all so unbearable). He has a new girlfriend now and they kiss and hold hands and something inside me breaks (maybe she was soft in ways I never was, maybe it was always me). Is this how love works? Was it always supposed to be this way?

I’m back in a stairwell. blue faced and weak

and weak

and weak.

It isn’t getting easier.

[moona-257]

you claim to be holy and I know damn well that you aren’t but I’m so lonely that I will take the wine and I’ll take the bread. drink it all down, say I’m full of love. when I find my own wrists stapled to a cross, I will have no one to blame but myself.

[moona-257]

sunshine lover. body shaped like the word devour and I’m hungry, so hungry. sunshine lover. come lay in the garrets of my heart. let me kiss your wrists. let me love you. let me take all of you for myself. won’t you come linger, love?

winter lover. I’ll never be your snow covered sweetheart, wrapped up in a white sheet. you’ve devoured every aching corner of my heart. winter lover. all my poetry and writing is yours, though I didn’t want them to be. winter lover. cut my wrists. staple them to a cross. I am nothing more than yours.

[moona-257]

come teach me why flowers grow better with blood-based fertiliser. come bury me in the ripe plum of your body, tangle around me like ivy. see, im so tired of dragging around this empty casket of a mind. see, i know I shouldn’t but baby, I’m fucking hopeless over you.

[moona-257]

see, I turn silent during sex. my voice buries itself in my throat like a messy bloodclot. how could I be anything other than passive anyway? anything other than silent? my abuser carries my voice around like his souvenir, has split my body in two and took one half with him. left me with skin I don’t recognise, a body that still mistakes warmth for war. i turn silent during sex. let his hands paint orchids on my neck, let his fingers climb up me in search of my secrets, let his body into mine until I have nowhere to put the bad memories. this body isn’t mine. I don’t think it ever will be.