To my abuser

When you’re feminine, you’re soft.
When you’re too nice; you get taken advantage of.
When you’re too nice and feminine? It’s always your fault.
Then there are the beautiful ones, who are too nice and too feminine.
Loaded with mental instabilities.
That was me.
When I met you.
I was nice to everyone, including you.
I’ll admit, I liked your ‘I don’t give a fuck attitude.’
But what was it about me that drew you to me like a moth to a flame?
Was it just my disposition?
Childhood trauma impulsively making me want to people please.
Affable and fair. Quick to apologize.
You took advantage of me, the prey to your animal.
It started with fights that escalated from ember to inferno in an instant.
Soon, my days were not complete until I had cried.
Emotionally exhausted and questioning my life.
The fighter inside of me wanted to war, and I fought back.
That’s when things got bad.
I mean, I wasn’t supposed to talk back- I was supposed to obey.
How dare I?
That was when it became more than screaming.
It was choking.
Pushing.
Being held down.
My third eye finally opened, even after all my battles with alcohol.
It still opened.
Tired of tip toeing over shards of broken glass.
The tiny cuts became infected, they pussed and festered.
Day after day of rage, all aimed at me.
Your rage was your weapon.
Your defense mechanism to your authentic emotions because you were always taught to swallow your feelings.
Feelings were weakness.
Feelings were for women.
The inferior gender.
The trauma you suffered at the hands of your father and your alcoholic mother, all rolled into one crying tiny child buried inside of you.
You never healed that child and birthed your very own trauma to nurture in the flesh
With me.
The sting of your words burned my ears each day until they bled.
Faced shoved to the carpet, repeatedly being told I wasn’t shit.
I was… nothing.
A nobody.
It didn’t take many break-ups to make ups for you to no longer treat me as a person, but an employee.
If my job was not done correctly, I was punished.
Night after night I begged you to be quiet.
Don’t wake the baby.
Please don’t yell.
Just stop.
On Christmas Eve, you shoved yourself down my throat until I had tears in my eyes while you drove us home.
You finished and said thank you.
While I cried in the truck for an hour.
My ultimate bottom. It was lonely and dark.
I would die in this trailer, next to a person I didn’t love.
I hated you from that moment on.
A hatred that brought me to the bottle every night while our baby boy slept next to our bed.
The perfect little angel that he was.
Let my Libra moon remind you; there are two sides to every story.
And true to who I am; I have thought of this often.
I could be the villain in your story; but hate only breeds hate.
And I always chose peace.
You took a love, and you crushed it.
You crushed my self-confidence, my worthiness.
My value.
You tried to crush my soul, but you failed.
Friends, family and therapists have congratulated me on my escape.
Being told that I’m lucky.
You will always paint me as the monster.
Perhaps because you realized your mistake but aren’t man enough to admit them.
Maybe if you made peace with that, you would make with within yourself.
My monsters aren’t under my bed.
I confront them daily, and we have become friendly.
Yours will remain buried deep inside your wounded soul.
Someday, my baby will understand why I did what I did.
For self-preservation, sanity.
Mental health and a bigger plan for me.
Call it selfish if you want to.
 I’ve made my peace with that perspective.
But I will tell you,
He will ask questions someday, there’s enough of me inside his blood to know that.
He will seek truth, perspective and guidance.
Someday.