There's a box of carbon in the garage that used to be my father. There's a poetry book in my room written by the girl I used to be before I'd been forced to examine every hour of darkness in detail. 1am was willing his chest to fall to a place it couldn't rise from. 3am was turning back into his little girl and searching desperately for proof of his existence. 5am was being too tired to face another thin-shouldered reality, and knowing morning comes slower without sleep.

And nobody understood, because I didn't tell them.

I didn't tell them about the day my mother scolded me for writing on myself, and I wanted to remind her that at least ink doesn't scar. I didn't tell them how his fungal skin flaked away and left a rash on my leg, or how he looked at me like a frog sighting its prey, or how I cried every time he came home.

His abuse was slow and constant, the kind of thing people look at and assume they could handle. But they don't know how the silence kept building, how happiness is the assumption, so not many bothered to look further. They don't know how humiliating it is to open your mouth to tell someone you're fine, and instead find that you've broken down in their arms the way you usually only do on your bathroom floor.

But they also don't know what it's like to let someone in that far. They don't have the kind of mark it leaves, like a tattoo over a scar. Until they've been emptied into pieces, they won't understand how beautiful it is to be whole. My eyes have something now that wasn't there before, a need to teach and to heal, a realization that life can't be painless if it's going to be real.

In this existence, I'll gain and lose everything. Nothing stays the same; pieces of me I thought I needed slowly fall away. But what will never change is this ability to love and be loved, to trust and get broken, and to do it all again. Always, where one poem ends, another one begins.