Capacity to trust;

What to do with love? Bottle it; give it airholes. Label it, analyse it.

Use it as your medicine or your poison. Put it on a dusty cupboard shelf. Hide it with your dreams.

I’m not clamping my silence between my teeth; I’m clamping my rape between my thighs. Am I failing to give my rapes space in my life? Do people not want to know such terrible things? It’s uncomfortable to hear.

But I didn’t change. People sometimes say that when they survive a rape, they find that they are in a way altered, and can’t find the person they were before. I don’t remember the first time I was raped. I’ve grown with the experience, it’s in my fibres.

I might have been a bitch. I don’t know my ‘before’ personality. Perhaps she doesn’t matter. My life will change me in many other ways before I die. I could look on my personality that never appeared like an abortion maybe.

In a lot of ways, I normalised the experience. I thought rape was nothing out of the ordinary. It was an uncomfortable experience that I struggled not to process.

Living without rape is difficult. There’s some aching piece of flesh in me that wants to be violated. No-one wants to change. Is some part of me like a computer? Reprogram me psychologists. Reboot me, wouldja?

How do you begin to explain being an 8 year old prostitue? How do I begin to get over how much I hate every cell of my body for it, still?

I still feel like a whore. How do I accept love and intimacy?

I would have given anything to be safe growing up. But I wouldn’t want to compromise who I am today. Perhaps I would have reached this persona eventually anyway. Maybe it’s like a relay race, and I picked up an early baton?