nineteen

I couldn’t tell you about the time I first laid eyes on you. 

I don’t remember, probably because you weren’t

special, spectacular, or even interesting.

You were older than I thought, 

shocked to learn you were thirty. 

I was nineteen.  

That Thursday in January,

you messaged me out of the blue. 

Would you want to get dinner with me tonight? 

Pity? Curiosity? 

Who knows why I even replied. 

The feeling of unease that rose in my chest as I dressed. 

The anxiety as I got in the car.

The question (why am I here?) when I saw you. 

I still remember the chill of the metal chairs in the near empty restaurant. 

The music was too loud, the lights were too bright. 

I remember the way you sat across the long community table from me,

you smiled, 

eyes warm, yet… unsettling. 

I shoved my hands underneath my thighs to keep them from shaking. 

Discomfort? Dissatisfaction? The clearly mistakable inherent wrong? 

Maybe I felt bad for you,

maybe I liked the attention. 

We chatted over text, 

made plans to see each other. 

Was it feelings of desire I was developing? 

or something to placate the shame that coated my skin?

No one knew–they couldn’t. 

I couldn’t face the judgment and eyes of caution 

I was warranted. 

Granted, I couldn’t blame them, any of them. 

I deserved it. 

I deserved every glance of disappointment I was given. 

I was just a girl

who wanted to be loved. 

twenty

The saying goes that time flies when you’re having fun;

those nine months were molasses. 

Dark nights, sitting in the back of my car, 

hidden from the exposure of streetlights, 

wanting sex when I wouldn’t give it. 

“I’m waiting,” I told you. 

How much of that was true?  

Maybe I just didn’t want my first time to be in the back of a car

with someone a decade older than me. 

That shame would scrape at my skin,

until I tore it all off. 

It was honestly no wonder you had her at home 

to give you what I wouldn’t. 

The missing puzzle piece finally clicked into place. 

Everything that I had pushed to the background of my mind

came flooding to the forefront.

Didn’t I ever think it was strange? 

You never invited me over;

rumors of a girlfriend who wasn’t me;
I never told anyone about us. 

The worst part is that I fell for all of it. 

I fell for the lies you told:

When you said I was the only one for you,

you wanted a future with me,

you loved me. 

You had a hold of me.

Disgusted would suffice. 

twenty-three

I recently read this book about a fifteen-year-old girl

who got into a relationship with her forty-two-year-old teacher. 

It wasn’t exactly the same, but I couldn’t help but 

see us slipped between the lines. 

The infatuation, the obsession. 

She told me that there was 

no hate in her heart.

She didn’t think that she was 

manipulated, 

abused,

groomed. 

She thought, believed, she was loved,

and she loved him back.

It’s okay. I thought I did, too.

Stupid, stupid girl. 

My teen years had come to a close, yet 

I knew the eighteen-year-old inside me was 

disappointed. 

A man like him was never in the plan.

I am haunted but the memories 

of the time we shared. 

We never took any photos together,

no physical mementos except for an 

ugly locket you got me for my twentieth birthday. 

The first and last thing you ever bought me, thrown away with the trash. 

A well-kept secret turned into well-hidden shame. 

You came along with a dark shadow trailing behind you. 

turning my sunlight into storm clouds. 

To think I wrote poems of heartbreak about you. 

I can’t read what my own heart and fingers said

because of the damage you caused. 

You know what they say about hindsight.

Still, my young heart beats.