by the girl you tried to rewrite into someone else’s place.
©ESR 2025

⚠️**Content Advisory** Childhood sexual assault. Not graphic; but no doubt in subject matter.

You weren’t a monster
with claws or fangs
or blood on your breath.
You were a man—
troubled, aging,
cracking quietly
beneath the weight of your own unraveling.

You were supposed to be safe.
A family friend.
The kind they trust to hold house keys
and pick up kids from school.
You laughed with my parents.
Smiled with crooked grace.
But the wires behind your eyes
had long since come undone.

Your wife—
the one who never looked at you
without a wince—
was cheating.
And you knew.
But you couldn’t rage at her.
So you found me.
Young.
Obedient.
Unsuspecting.

You looked at me
and saw something else.
Not me—
but a shape
to pour your hunger into.
A stand-in
for the woman who stopped touching you.
You told yourself it was affection.
That I was mature for my age.
That I needed it.
That it was special.

But I was a child.
And you knew that.
You knew that.
And you still let your hands
answer questions
you were too broken to ask a grown woman.

Your sickness wasn’t just in the act—
it was in the logic
you built to live with it.
You spun stories in your mind
where you weren’t the villain.
You were the unloved man.
The misunderstood man.
The wounded husband
just looking for comfort.

And I—
I was the cost.
The collateral.
The girl who smiled politely
because she hadn’t yet learned
that even kindness
can be a trap.

You made my body
a battlefield
for a war that had nothing to do with me.
You dragged me
into your delusions
and called it care.

For years,
I thought it was my fault
for not saying “no” loud enough.
For not running.
For not biting.
But I was too small
to carry your damage
and too young
to know betrayal
until it had already happened.

Now I sit in rooms with low lights
and soft chairs
and finally say the words
that used to make me nauseous.
I name what you did.
Not to shame—
but to survive.

You weren’t a monster.
You were a man
who made a choice
to use a child
to feel powerful
when your own life
was crumbling like wet newspaper.

And now,
I’m trying to reclaim pieces
of the girl you rewrote
with your fantasies.
She was not your wife.
She was not your lover.
She was not there
to carry the rot
you refused to clean from your own soul.

She was a child.
And now she is me.
And I remember you—
even when I wish I didn’t.

But I will not carry your sickness
in my skin anymore.
I will not bleed your name
into future love.
I will not twist myself
to understand
why you were broken.

Because being broken
is never an excuse
to break someone else.

And you broke me.
But I survived.
And now I write this
not for you—
but for me.

So she—
the girl I used to be—
can finally stop whispering
what should have always been

a scream.