She pushed my face into an ocean of soaked hair, heat, skin. Thats where it starts and a part of me ends. No blood or screams. Gasping for air beneath the weight of her want, my body learning that safety does not exist.

She called it love. When her twitching stopped, the room hadn’t changed. But I had.

Like cement poured on mud: unstable, yet burying everything inside alive. I grew up building a temple on a sinkhole, always looking strong enough to last, yet never steady enough to stop trembling, forever fixing fissures.

These balloons are paradise lost. Harmless, pretending to be joy. They don’t lift me; they hang. Each string a memory closing around my throat, unable to speak. The past doesn’t fade. It waits. “Hang in there” - calls that adulthood. So that’s what I do.

Below, my inner child watches - Shocked by the door kicked in, that shouldn’t have opened at all. Not yet. She thinks I point to accuse her, but I’m saying: I still see you, don’t fear! But I’m not strong enough to lift her out of that room. She’s too small to reach me. These wings never learned flight, only how to take a fall. I’m floating away.

Instead of an angel, I became a monument of wear and tear. A body turned crime scene, kept upright by shame. Useful only being used. The truth is: neither of us stood a chance. And it’s nobody’s fault.I’ll tell the truth until it hurts enough to be heard. Look, child! You must know why you flinch when someone loves you, why you confuse being wanted with being used, why you mistake pain for devotion.

I spent years turning what was taken from you into something that passes for art, a memorial of your existence. But the soul remembers what the mind erased. Memories turn noose. Dreams crack the concrete where a heart still fights to beat. We are mirror and echo, cause and effect, the same person, dying twice.

We were too young to understand when it happened, until we became too old to forget. Younger me, I want to take you out of there, even if I have to smash the walls that now protect our fragile hearts. Don’t be ashamed. It’s not your fault.

Some call it living, We call it survival - we both know the cost:

Innocence Lost.