Slip and slide

I wish i could slide out of my skin.

It’s the skin they came for, not me.

Its the skin that they pawed at, that they would shove against walls and squeeze at it’s most sensitive spots.

How dare my skin make them that way, how dare my skin tempt prowling fingers and gnawing teeth… breaking under the pressure in welts streaked with blood.

Damn skin, why couldn’t you be stronger. Why couldn’t you take more pain before you cried. Why could you turn that “lovely shade of red”, but you must know it’s the screaming he really liked…

No one could hear my skin crying at night. It wanted to be bigger, braver, to someday run far away where hands and teeth and whips cant find it.

I hate this skin.

I want to slip out of it and leave it to fend for itself.

Why have you trapped me here?

In a prison too weak to fight back, frozen in fear, and so tired from the pain.

I tried to cut it off… but it only grows back.

I’ve tried to change its shape

To cover it.

But then differnt ones came with their greedy hands.

“Easy pickings” he called me “you can always tell the ones that are already broken in.” As he grabbed my arm, drunk and mad as hell.

That day my skin held it’s own for as long as it could, but he was stronger and meaner, and I’d love to give this a happy ending but there isn’t one…

I don’t think any amount of time will undo the feelings of being helpless and the nausea of strange pangs of fear that freeze every muscle in me.

It makes me so ashamed.

I just want to feel safe… I just want my skin to be mine alone.