When I was young I was told to keep quiet.
Shorts down, blouse up, rigid hands in places,
Voices quiet whispering corrupted praises,
Clandestine secrets for sweets and 10 pence.
‘’Promise me now, you won’t tell your parents’’.
At the time, it didn’t affect me, didn’t rumble my core.
Toeing, ditsy, out the room, down the stairs, through the door.
Life carried on unfolding anew,
But startlingly my innocence had bidded ‘Adieu!’,
I still tried each day to play with my dolls,
But now mums kiss on the cheek evoked shamed withdrawals.
The dolls became martyrs,
obscenely posed in my grief,
Dollhouse walls witnessing trauma that screamed underneath.
Events in order from that shadowy night,
My own little tragedy Barbie, staged in plain sight.
Nobody knew the secret I kept,
What reeled through my mind at night as I slept.
I didn’t think too much of it as a kid while I grew,
but now I realise how it stalled my worldview.
15 years old, ten years of silence.
My friends are explorative, rebels loud in defiance.
They kiss girls and boys, giggling at lunch,
But each joke in my gut feels like a punch.
the thought made me writhe,
I figured maybe the desire would could within time.
But 20 came quick, blowing candles closed-lidded,
And I’m Brandished with the title,
People asked, feeling permitted.
Each question making memories flash up in vivid.
I questioned with an air of shame.
Isn’t ’body count’ just societies game?
Does it matter how many people I’ve slept with before?
After all I’d still be judged if I said 50, 15 or 4.
This trauma makes conversations like this hard for me, I admit.
expelling them with spit.
Truthfully, at 25, I sit and wonder why,
the thought of someone’s touch still makes me feel shy.
But I’ll laugh at their questions in airy reply.
And I’ll swallow the cries and conjure up a lie.
I’ll save the discomfort stories like this create.
Protect all my peers, and instead, self-deprecate.
My frigidness is my fault, keep playing pretend;
Act like at five my life didn’t upend,
But in reality I sit lonely at night, illuminated only by my bedside light.
And I think and I think until my mind turns sore.
Concluding an answer carved from earnest candor:
I’ll always be haunted by this ghost of someone,
who turned intimacy into something I shun and run from.
