Imagine A World Where What You Did Isn’t Okay

Imagine a world where it’s not okay.

Envision a world where it doesn’t make sense. Play pretend and in this pretend, take away all the ways you’ve made this make sense. Take away all the rationalizations, all the things he’s said to make it ok.

Fill this world with pretend things. With pretty things and kind, interesting things. With people you love and people you can’t talk to anymore. Pretend it doesn’t make sense. Pretend the hurt isn’t your fault. Pretend anyone else would feel hurt by this too. Imagine what that world might look like and imagine who you would be in that world.

I imagine and I’m lost there because no matter who I imagine I am in that world, I’m happy just not to be in this one. I want to stay. Can I? Is it okay if I become a child for a day? I’ll eat candy and play in leaves. Climb trees; skin my knees. Here I’m happy because here I’m innocent.

But now I’m afraid. I can’t be innocent. I’m not anymore. Damn it! I wanted to be the one to take away my own innocence, it was never a role I gave you. Did I? Forget it, I’ll be vulgar and dirty, dance slutty and smoke weed. In my heart, it’s a plead. “Don’t see my weakness. Don’t see I was different. I’ll be just like the others. Just let me blend in and forget who I am in the chaos of us all. Please?”

All this because I can’t get the smell of you out of my clothes.

I’m not kidding. I’ve tried. But through the haze of cleanness, I still smell you and I hate it. I feel furious and helpless. Like no matter how far away from you I get, the mist of what you did still lingers on me. All my favorite clothes carry your reminders and I stand this morning, frozen and naked, with nothing to wear.

I’ll burn the clothes. I’ll burn all of it. I’ll stop wearing the clothes I wore when you were on top of me. I’ll stop being the person I was when you said you cared and showed you didn’t. You said you love my hair so I’ll make it disappear. Poof! Like magic. You lay on my body so I’ll change my body. Scar it, starve it, tattoo it, do anything to make it unrecognizable as the one you claimed to love.

But you’re still there in my mind. Leave me alone! I hear your cries of ecstasy echoing in my head in a loop that never warps. It never skips.

It never fucking dies.

I can hear it like it’s happening in real time. It must be because now I feel you on top of me. The tears I make across my skin tell me it can’t be now but I still feel you on me. I’m not the me I was when you possessed me but I can still feel you. Jerking yourself along me, your hands creeping beneath my shirt and your hips against mine, grinding over me. Your hands reach lower and you pull at my ass, thrusting me against you. Why? To create some sick illusion that I wanted this too? You know better, you have to.

You have to.

Please, tell me you have to.

So, imagine a world where this isn’t okay. Where friends don’t do this to friends.

But I can’t because I know if I do I’ll never recover.