Once upon a time

Once upon a time,
They mistook me for a story.

Something to be edited until it became easier to read,
Passed from one careful hand to another
Until my truth no longer sounded like my own voice,
Until the silence between their questions
Said more than any answer I could have given.

I knew stories long before I knew what fear could inherit.

I carried them into classrooms
Where children sat cross-legged on borrowed afternoons,
Still convinced dragons announced themselves with smoke,
That wolves always looked like wolves,
And every lost child eventually found the path home.

We read as though endings were promises.
We believed enough kindness could rescue anyone.
We believed that people were good.
Perhaps I believed it most.

I thought monsters could be defeated. 
If you were good. 
No one warned me that monsters could wear borrowed smiles
And decide which stories deserve a sequel. 

I thought truth possessed its own gravity,
That it would always land where it belonged,
That apologies arrived carrying repentance,
That honesty, spoken gently enough,
Could never be mistaken for invention.

Then one afternoon
Divided my life into margins labelled before and after,
And suddenly every memory began checking
Which side of the page it belonged on.

The city stayed unbearably hot.
Traffic still threaded itself through familiar streets.
People kept laughing in hallways
Where my voice had already begun disappearing.

Only the mirrors changed.
They started asking questions
I no longer knew how to answer.
Water forgot how to become water.
How to make me feel clean.

Each evening it became a language
I spoke against my own skin,
Hoping memory would loosen its grip,
Hoping the girl I had been
Might recognise me again if I scrubbed hard enough.

No one tells you that the hardest part is not always the wound.

Sometimes it is placing your truest sentence
Into another person's hands,
Only to watch them weigh it,
Turn it over,
Search for cracks that were never there,
Before returning it gently
To the shelf marked fiction.

I arrived
With the truest thing I had
They asked
For footnotes

People do not trust truth. 

They trust authority. 

If there is a loud voice, 

It is trusted over truth. 

I thought stories would save me. 

They didn't. 

People did. 

The right people. 

One arrived when I was ten, just a little girl. 

One was a stranger who chose kindness

One smelled like home

The stories taught me how to carry what people could not. 

So, I keep writing, 
Hoping that justice still exists
That someone hears my cries
And believes in a happy ending

(I've written about this a lot, but it's one thing that never ceases to tear at me from the inside out.)