I lay here, awake and restless, unable to find sleep, because from me it’s lost amid a place that is foreign to the conscious of my mind.

My eyes won’t close, and my heart won’t open.

I’m thinking about what could be when I know that’s not what I really want.

I’m open to change, but for some reason destiny won’t allow me to have it all.

I promise that I wish that these words would dance across this tainted page more eloquently.

But I think these stanzas enjoy my long lived, over written misery.

How can you truly find words to describe how much pain you’re truly in?

How is it even possible to lose everything, when there is nothing worth a win?

How can you find a savior when everyone around you is hurt?

How can you take happiness into account, when your body is underpaid and over worked?

I thought that I could find my measure by stirring love between my thighs.

I figured that I could expose myself, by giving my list, and doing away with sad good-byes.

But it’s like the hurricane said, your gorgeous and beautiful, but they never see it when they take you home.

I guess that’s why there is a lover sprawled out on the floor next to me, but I still feel empty and alone.

I want death to show me his face, and then turn me back to life.

Show me the pain of lifelessness once more, than clean up this blood, when he takes out this knife called life.

This poison has slipped into my veins, and I doubt that this girl will ever be the same.

Some man stole the innocence that should have been my choice to give away.

He took my right to be a child, and I’m still fighting for her today.

When I cry, he is there standing behind me.

I’ve tried to outrun his touch, but the pain of his hurt always manages to erase me, and invade the invisibility of my intimacy.

Everyman that I see looks just like him.

Even my loneliness resembles who with him I used to be.

Those nights I would yell out of the window, begging for a neighbor to hear, some soul to save me from those unwanted nights, that I tried to ignore were real.

I hated that door with the lock that never seemed to work.

And the mother that I needed so badly to hear me cry, but she could never feel or hear my hurt.

Those feet that would quietly come up the stairs, when I was in my room at night.

Those sheets that would come off of my body, and my sleep that couldn’t resist the fight.

The urge to want to get up, run, scream, and tell.

But the outer body experience that left me paralyzed unable to do anything, but surrender to what would be ignored in the morning.

The hunger to want to kill him for this secret in the night, for pretending to love me when he really saw me with lustful eyes.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way.

I was just a child, now I’m a woman wearing the same worn tennis shoes, trying to run empty miles.

Wanting to burn that bed that was an alter for what is now the sacrifice of my life.

How many more nights will I cry?

How many days lay ahead of me with sadness in my eyes?

Will I ever truly have happiness, or will I always be in pursuit of this fleeting thing?

Can find a way to ignore this rage, or obey this this anger that has its hold over me?

Will the man, from my past land, ever just walk out of my life for good, so that I can be free?

Or am I destined to always have this void, carry this hurt, and eternal pain, this heart built of tragedy?

I never thought that I would be that girl, wondering aimlessly, just searching for love, looking back on the child that could have been.

 It’s all of those thoughts that make me mad.

But when I recollect these heartbreaking memories, try to undo all of those nights spent drowned in tears, I know who could have rewrote these chapters, his name was stepdad.