(inspired by a friend who shared her story thank you for trusting me) ❤️

the last time I ate my fear

on the table before me lays all my childhood trauma pain and fear

the last time I ate my fear, I picked it all out… but there was no other way but to sit at the table and eat it all up … I spoke for the first time, out loud to make the pain disappear… instead, pain dug its nails deeper turning wounds bitter…

at once I saw a little girl, robbed and broken, a teenage girl, robbed trapped in a grown woman’s body, cutting herself with broken glasses…

I hide behind giving myself away to love, when love did not come in the form of a parent, a sibling… a relative that didn’t protect you…

What is love when war is all I know of? and when war is what I fled yet war is within me… scared, with a knife in my heart they only stabbed me once, twice perhaps three times, perhaps I’ve lost count… perhaps im to blame for girly giggles or whatever it was… And then I married someone… I eat it all… one by one, the first robbery, and the second, and… And… And…

I wipe my tears and pluck brokenness, from my hair to my nails…

the last time i ate my fear

I sat at the table to make the pain disappear

at the table decorated with unheard tears, and fears of girls and robbed, neglected, and blamed for poverty. We were poor but it wasn’t because of me… or was it?

I wasn’t supposed to be born a girl this I understood.. after giving birth to four girls my mother was promised a son in a dream… And here I came… my mother was shamed and blamed for not carrying boys in her womb and she in return cursed me to the moon.

Hush don’t speak, shut up, you annoy me… she loved me how she knew to love… I love her to the moon and back… I love her enough to understand she did what she was taught so I’m doing what I don’t know… Learning compassion as I crawl…

I am eating away my fears… and scars… one by one… the first robbery I devour it down with the seawater that claimed the life of those who didn’t make it to land with me and half of my sanity… Here I am a paperless refugee unwanted by lands and by lands and by lands…

Insane mind full of stories but no space for knowledge… I speak many languages but not enough to speak about the things that happened on the journies… People hear but people are damn good at minding their business when they should step in… but speak ill of you once you start to walk funny… with a slight limp…

I eat away my self-doubt, self-hate, and self-sabotaging ways… I chew it good with the abusive household I made my home… How could I not? The only hands that fed me where there to claim me…

I strayed yet never far enough… in bed, I laid but never rested…hungry I sit at the table to stand up one day full of life and meaning… The last time I ate my fears…