When I finally left the house

When I finally left the house,
I thought the demons would stay behind.

I thought evil belonged to hallways I already knew.

To footsteps. To doors.

To familiar shadows
stretching themselves against walls. I thought once I stepped outside,
I would be free.

But the demons followed me. Only this time,
they wore backpacks. Uniforms.

Sneakers. Perfume. Lip gloss.

They sat behind desks. They leaned against lockers.

They laughed inside cafeterias.

And something about them confused me.

Because these demons looked like me.

Not entirely.

Our histories were different.

Our homes were different.

Our families carried different stories.

But there was enough familiarity in their faces
for me to believe surely,
surely,
someone who looks like me will recognize me.

Someone will understand. Someone will say,
Come sit here.

Instead,
they united around something else. Me.

Not to love me. Not to protect me. To dismantle me. Layer by layer.

And I refused
to let them see it happening. That became my talent.

Smile. Laugh. Pretend.

Shrug.

Roll your eyes.

Act like the joke
didn’t land somewhere tender.

Act like the whisper didn’t follow you home.

Act like hearing your name through someone else’s laughter
doesn’t make your stomach collapse.

Act like being compared to animals
doesn’t eventually make you wonder whether you still look human.

They could not see the tearing. That mattered to me.

If they were going to break me,
I would at least deny them the sound.

So outside,
I remained standing. Inside,
I was being pulled apart
with both hands.

Friends came.

Or what I thought were friends.

I believed in forever very easily back then.

Children do.

You share secrets
with someone for six months
and suddenly imagine them standing beside you
when you’re eighty. I did that.

I collected people
and called them permanent.

Then watched permanent learn how to leave.

Some betrayed me. Some disappeared.

Some simply found better places to sit.

And I learned another cruel thing: sometimes abandonment
doesn’t arrive dramatically.

Sometimes nobody screams. Nobody fights.

Nobody says goodbye.

They just stop saving you a seat. High school taught me that.

I tried to latch onto people
not because every friendship was extraordinary,
but because loneliness
had already eaten enough of me. I didn’t want another empty room.

Another empty chair.

Another silence. So I clung.

Not beautifully. Not proudly.

Desperately. And eventually, there I was.

At a lunch table. Alone.

Watching everyone else laugh somewhere else.

Do you know
what hunger sounds like? Not stomach hunger.

Something worse.

It sounds like laughter from another table.

Everyone around you being fed something you cannot touch.

Belonging. Inside jokes.

Someone scooting over. Someone saying,
I saved you a seat.

I sat there starving
for one piece of laughter.

Just one. A crumb. A glance.

A reason to believe
my absence from their table had been accidental.

It wasn’t.

I watched everyone outgrow me. And I stayed in the shadows, hungry.

Eventually school ended.

I thought adulthood would be different.

Adults are mature. Adults don’t bully.

Adults understand people better. What a beautiful lie.

I found jobs. New rooms. New faces.

New versions of the same sentence. GiGi is strange.

GiGi is too much. GiGi doesn’t fit.

GiGi isn’t the standard.

Different building. Same courtroom. And somehow,
I was always on trial.

Then there were boys. God.

The boys.

The ones I thought I wanted.

The ones I believed
could give something back to me that had been taken.

Beauty. Desirability. Proof.

Some of them made it very clear
they wouldn’t touch me
even if kindness cost nothing.

Wouldn’t spit on me if I were burning.

And their cruelty carried a different blade.

Because it wasn’t enough for them not to want me.

Sometimes they needed me to understand
why.

They needed to diminish whatever beauty
I had managed to salvage.

Whatever femininity
I had managed to build.

Whatever tiny piece
of myself I held up and said,
At least I have this.

They wanted that too.

It was almost devotional.

As though destruction was an appetite.

As though Aphrodite herself could stand beside them,
beautiful, glowing, perfect,
and they would still need a Medusa nearby
just so they could point and laugh.

Beauty wasn’t enough.

Someone had to be ugly for beauty to feel powerful.

And somehow,
I kept volunteering for the role.

I tried to take myself back.

I really did.

I searched for pieces.

I would have been grateful for pieces.

Fragments. Shards.

Something. Anything.

If my confidence had shattered like glass,
I could have gathered it.

Cut my hands putting it together.

Bled a little. Taped the cracks. Called it art.

But there were no pieces. Only ashes.

Dust. Cinders.

Things too small to hold.

Things that scattered when I breathed.

So I did what lonely people sometimes do.

I began laying myself down wherever someone needed a place to bury their pain.

Use me.

Tell me I’m pretty afterward. Use me.

Call me back tomorrow. Use me.

Let me pretend you chose me.

The first time hurt.

The second time hurt differently. By the third,
something inside me
had learned how to leave the room while my body stayed.

Detachment
is such a quiet survival skill. Nobody applauds it.

Nobody even notices. You’re still smiling.

Still answering. Still there.

But somewhere inside,
the lights have gone out.

I began reconstructing femininity from whatever people seemed willing to notice.

My body became scaffolding.

My breasts became mountains because if someone climbed them, maybe for a moment
I could pretend
the landscape was worth seeing.

Maybe if somebody wanted one part of me,
I could convince myself the whole woman
had value.

I mistook attention for evidence.

And attention is such a cheap drug.

You don’t realize
how little you’re receiving
when you’ve spent your entire life starving.

Then the rumors came. Of course they did.

Rumors always love
a girl already standing alone. People began saying things.

My name traveled
into rooms before I did.

Stories wore my face.

Voices were attributed to me when I had never spoken.

People swore
they heard me say things
while I was nowhere near them. And the first few times?

I smiled.

God forgive me, I smiled.

Because they acknowledged me.

Do you understand
how lonely someone has to become
before even cruelty feels like recognition?

At least my name was in their mouths.

At least I existed somewhere.

Even incorrectly. Even disgustingly. Even as gossip.

That is what loneliness does.

It lowers the price of being seen.

Eventually, the fire grew.

Rumors became flames.

And flames do what flames do.

They don’t care
who struck the match. They only want oxygen.

Girls looked at me with disgust.

How could you say that? How could you do that?

How could you tell people that? And sometimes,
the most humiliating part was knowing that
maybe I had agreed to pieces of things
just for the smallest amount of attention.

An ounce. A crumb. Anything.

Because when someone has spent years outside the circle,
sometimes they will pay admission with pieces of themselves.

But the girls were not kinder. That hurt differently.

I expected cruelty from boys
after awhile.

But girls?

I wanted sisterhood. I wanted softness.

I wanted the sacred understanding of being women together.

If one of their crowns had tilted,
I would have stopped time to straighten it.

If they handed me a cloth and told me
their crown had lost its shine,
I would have knelt and polished it.

Not because I believed they were above me.

Because I believed
we were one of a kind. I still believe that now. Women are remarkable. Beautiful.

Terrifying. Complicated. Resilient.

And maybe that is why their cruelty hurt so much.

Because while I was willing to repair their crowns,
some of them sharpened their teeth on mine.

Their mouths could be worse than fists.

They stripped me apart sentence by sentence.

And in their eyes, sometimes scum
seemed to have more value
than I did.

My body became public property. Everyone had metaphors.

Everyone became a poet when describing something they hated about me.

Elephant. Buffalo. Hippopotamus.

Say the name of something enormous and suddenly
every pair of eyes knew where to land.

Me.

Their jokes had rhythm. Timing.

Imagery.

They were poets at heart,
just cruel ones.

And I learned to laugh before everyone else could.

If I laughed first,
maybe humiliation would mistake itself for consent.

I remember the locker room. I remember the note.

Some things survive decades because humiliation preserves better than love.

A girl I thought might value me.

We lived in the same neighborhood. That meant something to me.

Small connections
always meant too much to me. Maybe she considers me a friend. Maybe this is real.

Maybe finally—Then the note. Words so sweet
I couldn’t believe
someone had written them about me.

Endearing. Sacred.

Tender.

And foolishly, beautifully,
I believed my crush had written it.

Of course I did.

I wanted romance before I understood how badly loneliness
could disguise itself as hope.

I carried those words like treasure.

Then came the reveal. The laughter.

The humiliation.

The steppingstone disappeared beneath my feet.

Again. Always again.

Every time I believed
I had finally climbed high enough to see somewhere beautiful,
someone remembered to remove the stone.

And down I went.

I counted the days
until I could leave high school.

Counted them like a prisoner
scratching marks into concrete. One less.

One less. One less.

I begged the wrong person to let me disappear.

That was another tragedy.

Asking someone
who never understood your pain
for permission to escape it.

Puberty had already opened something inside me.

A sealed room. A creature.

An anger I had spent years forcing underground.

And eventually,
it refused to stay buried. I screamed.

Yelled. Cried.

I fought walls. Doors.

Anything that could absorb
what I could not say to people.

My knuckles learned what rage sounded like.

My throat learned
how grief could scrape upward until even breathing
felt raw.

Anger would rise, rise,
rise,
and then curdle into crying.

Always crying.

Because underneath rage there was never really rage.

There was a child asking:

Why doesn’t anyone choose me?

That was the wound.

Everything else was scar tissue.

And yes,
I began hurting myself.

Not because pain was beautiful. It wasn’t.

Not because suffering made me interesting.

It didn’t.

I had simply spent so many years learning that hurt
was the language of correction that eventually,
when there was nobody else in the room,
I became fluent enough to speak it to myself.

The first time frightened me.

Then something terrible happened.

My mind learned that physical pain
could interrupt emotional pain. For a moment.

Only a moment.

And desperate people can become loyal
to moments.

Soon the anger
had somewhere to go. Into me.

The rage. Into me.

The humiliation. Into me.

The loneliness. Into me.

Everything people had thrown
at my body
I began carrying inward.

I became both
the wounded child
and the person punishing her. That is the part
I mourn most.

Because they had already hurt her. And somehow,
I learned to continue
their work.

I built sandcastles
from whatever pieces remained. Tiny dreams.

Tiny friendships.

Tiny compliments.

Tiny reasons
to believe tomorrow might finally feel different.

And every time one collapsed,
so did I.

You can rebuild a sandcastle a hundred times.

The ocean does not care. Eventually,
you stop blaming the wave.

You start blaming your hands.

Maybe I don’t know how to build.

Maybe I am the problem.

Maybe everyone leaves because there is something inherently leaveable about me.

Maybe everyone laughs because there is something inherently laughable about me.

Maybe nobody loves me because there is something inherently unlovable about me.

That is how demons win. Not when they insult you.

When they convince you
to continue the insult after they’ve gone home.

Years passed.

The classmates disappeared. The cafeteria disappeared.

The lockers disappeared. The note disappeared.

Most of the boys
became names I rarely remember. Jobs changed.

People moved.

The demons scattered. But fear is loyal.

It followed.

Someone laughs behind me? For half a second,
I am back there. Someone’s tone changes? I investigate myself.

Someone doesn’t invite me?

Suddenly I am sitting
at that lunch table again
watching everybody eat while I starve.

Someone tells me I am beautiful?

Part of me still waits for the punchline.

That is what they left. Not ugliness.

Not failure. Suspicion.

The inability
to receive tenderness without checking behind it for a trap.

But here’s what they failed to do. They never made me cruel.

That still amazes me.

After all the mouths.

All the laughter.

All the abandonment. All the humiliation.

I can still look
at another woman’s crown and want to straighten it.

I still believe
there is room for all of us.

I still believe beauty
does not require an ugly woman standing beside it.

I still believe another person’s light does not extinguish mine.

I still want people to feel included.

Seen. Wanted. Safe.

Perhaps that is my rebellion.

They spent years trying to teach me
that belonging was scarce.

I grew up
and decided to give it away freely.

Maybe that is why I write.

I build tables now. Entire worlds.

Rooms large enough for the lonely girl
at lunch.

I create people who are chosen.

People who are wanted with terrifying intensity.

Women who are seen.

Women whose scars do not disqualify them from devotion.

Maybe every fictional world I create
contains a chair
for the girl nobody saved one for.

Maybe every impossible love I write
is some tiny correction to a lifetime
of being told
not you.

Maybe somewhere inside every story
I am still standing in that cafeteria
looking at the empty seat beside everyone else.

Except now,
I control the page. So I drag out a chair.

I look at that lonely girl.

And I tell her:

Here.

Sit with me.

I saved you a seat.