So,
you found her.
The old me.
You clawed through
years of my survival
just to exhume a corpse
I spent a lifetime
putting to rest.
You dragged her up
by the hair,
dirt packed deep beneath your fingernails,
and shoved her rotting face
into mine
as if I don’t know
what my own past
looks like.
I know her.
I was there.
I was there for every
humiliating,
broken
version of her
you’re passing around
like a punchline.
You share her picture like a joke,
pointing
and laughing
at a frame frozen in time.
But I remember the terror
bleeding
just beyond the edge of the lens,
and I promise you,
it wasn’t funny.
I know.
Because I was the one
bleeding.
My transformation happened
slowly,
privately.
Paid for in blood,
at a cost you couldn’t afford
on your best day.
You mock me
as if outgrowing your own ruin
is some kind of fraud.
As if healing
is a deception.
As if evolving
is a performance,
rather than the brutal act
of surviving
long enough
to become
unrecognizable
to your own ghosts.
I
buried
her.
I buried her with panic attacks,
rocking back and forth
alone in the dark;
with apologies spoken
to empty rooms;
with nights spent staring
at my own reflection,
wondering who I was;
and now
with iron-clad boundaries
no one
will ever get to cross
again.
I know exactly who I was.
And I know exactly who I am.
But let me tell you
who I am
not.
I am not someone
who crawls through a cemetery
on my hands and knees
in the dark.
I am not someone
who tears my fingers to the bone,
packing graveyard dirt
into my own mouth,
just to drag someone else’s worst moments
back into the daylight.
But you
are.
You did that.
And the stench
of that rotting soil
on your hands
is far uglier
than anything you dug out
of my past.
One day,
the earth will turn.
One day,
you will outgrow
a version of yourself,
and you will have to lay them
in the ground.
When that day comes,
I genuinely hope
you are spared this.
I hope no one becomes
so starved for vengeance,
so consumed
by their own hollow bitterness,
that they desecrate your resting place
just to parade your corpse
through the town square.
I hope no one
mistakes your graveyard
for a stage.
And most of all,
I hope no one ever smiles
while trying to salt the earth
of a garden
that finally figured out
how to bloom.