by Sophia Shiroff
“Tell me where he touched you,”she said, holding out a green marker and sliding a sheet of paper across the table.
I wanted to grab the green marker and circle everywhere,
digging the tip of the marker into the paper
until the whole gingerbread man outline was covered in the childish crayola-green.
I wanted to be able to show her
how my mind would throw itself back into the moments
where I was nothing more than a
body beneath his hands.
I wanted to show her
how if my clothes hugged my body a certain way
how if someone stood too close to me
my whole body would collapse in on itself
being able to feel nothing other than him.
I want him to know that
all the cells in our body are replaced every ten years.
It’s going to take a decade of my life for his hands to have not touched my body.
But the memory of his hands are forever seared into my brain.
I want to tell him how long I’ve stood in scalding showers
until the water runs cold and my tears mix with the sudsy shampoo at my feet.
I’ve been trying to wash his touch off my body for the last four years.
No matter what I achieve
I still find my body
covered in his hands.
I want to tell him how many moments there are
where all I want is a hug, to cry into the embrace of someone who loves me
to have someone cradle me and whisper in my ear,
“you’re safe now, everything is going to be okay now”
but then his hands are on me and I can’t breathe.
How dare he take hugs from me.
I want to tell them that today I looked in the mirror and I saw myself again,
scars healing over the places he touched.
A glimpse of my body getting out from under him.
That even if it was just for a second,
I looked in the mirror and saw myself again.
My hand shakes and the tip of the crayola-green marker bleeds into the white paper.