My Skin

My skin‒

My skin is not like yours.

My skin is weak and worn.

Broken and torn, as if it was paper.

My skin is not mine anymore.

My skin is not mine, it is yours.

Why is it yours?

It should belong to nobody.

But you took it from me. 

My skin is not for you to take, nor for you to break. My skin belongs to me it should never have been questioned or misunderstood. My skin is mine despite all the wounds you had tried to inflict time and time again.

With not much left I had everything to give, I was stronger than you showed me I could’ve been. 

My skin is not weak or worn, nor torn. It is whole, wounds and battle scars but you didn’t take my skin from me.

Though it was hard for you to see, 

See what you had done completely. You knew the break, the weak but what you didn’t bother to see was the perseverance to show you what you didn’t succeed at.

A broken girl, what a shame but you only knew her face, not her name. Not her ways.

She was stronger and continued to get stronger every day. 

My skin. 

My skin is not up for debate, no question about it.

My skin cannot be torn but could bleed, I’m not weak.

She’s not weak, we are what you could not be.

My skin does not define the person I was, am or will be 

The wounds may never fully go away but they are not going to be my name. Of course, it was not this easy, nothing good ever comes easy. 

We had to fight every day, day and night. 

 We only got this far because we decided we were human. We were not broken people as you once told us we were. 

We became the people who came to when they needed to be heard. 

We listened, supported. When you left them all for dead. 

I guess I was not like you in the head, we cared for each other. 

Guided ourselves along with everyone else.

Those storybooks are knowingly sitting on the bookshelves. They’ll always be there but we choose to acknowledge and read new stories. 

we still have worries, still get scared

But we also know not everyone will leave us scarred like you.

The sky still shines, the rain still falls, the world still spins, nothing turned blue.

Nothing rotted away or turned to stone.

You told us lies to bury us in stones. To kill our blue skies.

When you only showed us darkness, pain and hurt, we found our worthiness. 

Darkness cannot and should not be feared but you did not teach us that, we had to feel the darkness on our skin to know that 

You were not right.

We stayed outside throughout the night, with nothing covering us but our lies.

The lies that tied us to you.

We are so much better without you.

My skin is mine.

Her skin is hers.

Their skin is theirs, you can no longer rid people of what is theirs. Flowers will grow from the holes your lies dug into our hearts, a million Roses, daisies, lilies, dandelions will shoot out of our heart because rain and pain made the garden grow.