THE BEFORE
- 10 hours ago
- 1 min read
By Janelle Standish
There are nights my body mutinies,
throws me back into rooms I swore I left.
The air thickens, turns animal.
Every shadow carries his shape.
Every silence tastes like warning.
My ribs still flinch at ghosts.
My skin remembers things
I never gave permission for:
hands that claimed me,
breath that cornered me,
a hunger that ate the edges of who I was.
I learned to disappear in plain sight,
to fold myself into something quiet,
something compliant,
something that would not be punished for wanting to live.
No one sees the places I still bleed from.
Bruises fade, but the body keeps score,
a ledger written in tremors,
in nights I wake choking on the past,
in days that feel borrowed from someone braver.
I don’t want redemption.
I want the truth raw,
unpolished,
unrescued.
I am tired of being a graveyard
for things he buried in me.
Tired of stitching myself back together
only to be torn open by memory.
This is the ache before the healing,
the scream before the voice returns,
the moment the light has not reached yet.
This is the truth
no one wants to hold-
I survived,
but some days
the surviving is what hurts the most.