217/365 Shapes [15/30]

Ever notice that when you're looking for something,
everything becomes the exactly same color as what your looking for,
shapes morph into that item
until your looking in the same place fifteen different times
because you know you checked there,
but you don't trust yourself.
 
Well
unknowingly,
I was looking for my father
when I stumbled across you. 
I thought you were an angel,
light bounced off your mahogany skin like a halo.
I thought you had the healing powers I’d been looking for,
Cause I’d been looking for the magical potions that could make to feel whole.
 
I thought if you held me,
you could erase the hands of my abuser
and replace the cradle of my transient father.
 
I didn’t realize, you would just end up leaving more finger-prints.
I am a walking crime scene.

Surviving rape
is like being stabbed 260 times and still living,
being drenched in gasoline and watching a pyro consider you not worth the flame.
I still have his face burned in my memories,
his beady black eyes and a blood-coated bed,
still have his handprints searing my skin.
I’ve been branded….

And I thought if I belonged to you,
I wouldn’t have to wear his stains,
and this crime scene
spotted across my skin like black light,
like a neon sign.
and people who look at me with eyes that burn like interrogation lights.

And I wish I didn’t fit the stereotype so well.
Wish they couldn’t know exactly how I walk, talk and act
just by knowing two facts about my past.

Wish they couldn’t guess which men
I were attracted to by getting a brief description of my father.

Every love poem I’ve ever written has remnants of him in it’s crevices.
Curved along the sides of pages,
whispered in the spaces between words.

I see his face so often in absence,
like an echo,
like a haunting,
like unhealed stab wounds,
like the smell of gasoline,
like remembering the face of someone who didn’t think you worthy of murder,
Who would torture you for the rest of your life without looking over their shoulder as they left you.
Who would be so clever as to abuse you between your legs where no one can see the scars,
stab you 260 times where it won’t kill you,
just render you worthless.

I had no idea this whole time I had been looking for my self worth in other people.
In you.
From a distance,
I could have sworn you had wings,
the way the light bounced off your mahogany skin like a halo
I didn’t realize I was looking at my own reflection,
I am the savior I’d been looking for.

Have you ever been looking for a pair of sunglasses that were on your head,
or told the person on your phone that you’d misplaced your phone.
What I’d been looking for,
I had all along.
I was just looking in the wrong direction.