Ring Finger

I love him.

More than anything.
There is no tremor in those words,
and I do not say that lightly.

There's a ring on my finger.
A stone that says Always.
Choose this.
Forever.

It catches moonlight,
when I reach for his face,
when I wake at 3 in the morning
and whisper his name.

But I'm so scared.

Not of him.
Never him.

I'm scared of the ghosts
that follow me into safe places.
I carry whole suitcases of yesterday.
They spill open
in the middle of tender moments.
They whisper
Don't trust this.
Keep your guard up.
Don't close your eyes.

And I'm trying.
God, I'm trying.

But sometimes my mind
mistakes windows for walls,
kindness for camouflage,
and I pull away
from the one thing
I so desperately
want to hold.

I love him.
That is the truest thing
I have ever said.

Still, doubt moves through me
like wind across water,
rippling what was calm
moments before.

He deserves so much more
than this tangle of fear.

What if I never learn
to rest?
What if I always half-stand,
half-ready to run
from the safest place
I have ever known?

This ring circles my finger.
It does not loosen
when I tremble.
It does not slip off
when I question.

It waits.
Patient.
Unbroken.

I'm not afraid
of loving him.

I'm afraid
of hurting him.

I'm afraid of never
learning to believe
that I am allowed
to be loved.

 

Why Didn't She Run?

It begins with kindness
offered to a girl
whose life has more cracks
than windows.

A ride.
A place to stay.
Someone who says
You're special,
and waits
until she believes it.

Trust grows fast
in empty places.

He knows that.
He looks for it.

A pill to quiet the shaking.
Another so tomorrow feels possible.
She has to earn the next one.

Soon her body
needs the same hand
that holds the leash.

He tells her the police
will lock her away.

He tells her
no one will believe
a girl like her.

He tells her
her family already knows
what she's become,
reminds her often
that she chose this life.

Lies repeated long enough
sound like truth
inside a tired mind.

Outside,
the world walks past
on ordinary afternoons,
expecting a girl in chains
who never appears.

The real chains are quieter.

Addiction.
Fear.
A voice that repeats
you belong to me
until it echoes
in her own.

When people ask
why she didn't run,

they are imagining a door
she was taught
not to see.

—

Most people don't realize that sex trafficking happens in broad daylight. It's not always chains and cages in a dark basement in some third-world country. It happens right here, right down the street, out in the open. And she won't ask for help when you pass her on the sidewalk, because she doesn't know she can.

My Best Friend

He didn't arrive with thunder.
No grand gestures, no fireworks.
Just a steady presence
when I needed one.

He learned the shape of me
without asking me to soften the edges.
The sharp corners, the quiet retreats,
the way I sometimes pull away
just to see who follows.

I'm not easy to love.
I know this.
I've said it out loud,
through a half-closed door.

He heard me,
and stepped through anyway.
Just to sit beside me
and say, I’m here.

And somehow
that was everything.

I'm still learning
how to be loved like this.
Still surprised
when he reaches for my hand
like it's the most natural thing
in the world.

Like it's home.

One day soon
I will stand beside him,
put a ring on his finger,
and promise out loud
what my heart already knows:

I choose you.
Always.

Even on the days I'm difficult.
Even when I doubt everything else.

Because you held me
when I was hardest to hold.

Because you stayed
when I tried to push you away.

Because somehow,
you make it feel
like I deserve
to be loved.

And you've taught me
to trust this.

 

Tomorrow

Her eyes keep counting exits,
hands held tight in her lap.
She sits where she can see the door,
like the room might turn on her
if she lets her guard down.

People say things to her.
Kind things, probably.
Gentle platitudes with careful faces.
I've heard them all before.

She nods
the way you nod when words
have stopped meaning anything.

I want to tell her
I know.

I know how the world goes dim
when the past barges in uninvited.
How nights fracture without warning.
How the ceiling becomes a movie screen
for scenes you never asked to replay.

I know the sudden terror
in ordinary moments.
Footsteps.
Voices.
Hands that move too fast.

The way memory
refuses to stay in the past
like they promise it will.

I want to sit beside her.
I want to tell her
it wasn't her fault.

Not the freezing.
Not the silence.
Not the part of her
that just wanted to survive.

But she wouldn't believe me.

I want to tell her that one day
the nightmares will thin out.
The flashbacks will lose their teeth.
The fear will loosen its grip
with each quiet exhale.

I want to tell her
laughter will come back
like a cautious animal
stepping into a clearing.

But she wouldn't hear me.
Not yet.

So I sit across from her
with all these words
burning holes in my chest
and hope that somewhere inside her
beneath the rubble,
beneath the noise,
beneath the long echo of what was done,
some small stubborn part of her

is still listening
for a voice
that believes in tomorrow.

 

Second Chance

Rain braids the night
into silver threads.

At the far end of Harvard Bridge
a figure stands beneath the dim
halo of a streetlight,
that old familiar Red Sox cap
tilted low against the rain.

For a moment I hesitate,
almost turn around.

Once before,
I mistook fear for clarity,
let our story loosen from my hands
like a balloon slipping skyward,
vanishing into distant clouds.

Wind moves through the street
carrying the quiet debris of memory:
a kiss caught in a stairwell,
coffee cooling on a windowsill,
the echo of footsteps
walking away too soon.

I remember the gravity of that choice.
How absence grows its own architecture,
walls built from regret,
doors that only open inward.

I step forward.
Each footfall
breaks the thin ice of hesitation,
shortens the careful distance
I once mistook for safety.

Running now,
I see the familiar shape
of his smile waiting beneath the rain,
a harbor light,
steady,
unafraid,
warm.

There are a thousand things
I want to say,
things I didn't say then.

They all dissolve
in the quiet space between breaths.
I let the truth arrive simply,
like warmth returning
to cold hands.

Rain hides my tears,
and a small, impossible miracle
stands in the glow
beneath a Boston streetlight.

If you love someone, set them free.
You know the rest.

Thank you for coming back.

 

Everything

I want you to have it all.

There are histories written in the cracks.
Places where I was dropped
and gathered myself again.
The scarred and the shining pieces
all live in the same heart.

I give you my softness,
the part I sometimes mistake for weakness.
And the iron threaded through it,
the will that holds its ground
because it has learned to survive.

I give you my questions, my doubts,
and the faith that outlives them.
My longing.
My becoming.
The parts still learning
how to trust.

Everything.

I lay all of it,
carefully
in your hands.

 

Knowing

She says they're nothing.
Just clumsy.

I tell her, softly,
I've seen bruises like that before.
There.
I wore them
under summer dresses.
I know how they get there.
I know.

She nods
as if I've commented on the weather.

The clock counts off minutes
that last for hours.
The silence between us grows louder.

She will not let the bruises
become verbs.
Just colors.
Purple fading to yellow.

I want to gather her up,
tell her not to carry this alone.

She shrugs.

And I remember
how long I kept my own silence.
How sometimes the only thing
a body can do
is survive the night.

So I sit with her.
Knowing the bruises
will yellow and disappear.

Knowing the silence
will make room for more.

Knowing.

 

Porcelain

On my phone, a voicemail
I still can't delete.
Her voice.
Alive, ordinary,
asking about nothing important.

I cry at the sink.
Rinse the same blue coffee cup
again and again,
as if water could lift a stain
etched into porcelain.

There's no pause button.
The mail arrives.
The neighbor's dog
barks at nothing.

Grief sits down beside me,
gratitude pours another cup.
We talk like old friends.

My heart keeps breaking
and keeps saying
thank you.

There is room for both.
Still.

 

She Likes Dogs

Six homes in seven years.

She has learned the rules.
Don't eat too much.
Don't talk too loud.
Don't cry where anyone can hear.
Say [I]Thank you.
I'm sorry.
I'm fine.[/I]

There are fingerprints on her arms
that no one noticed,
bruises on her thighs
she won't talk about.
There are words in her head
that still sound like shouting.

She does not ask for much.
Not a big house.
Not matching pajamas.
Not a dog, though she would love one.

Just a kitchen light left on.
A door that stays open.
Someone who says her name
like it matters.

She wants arms that hold
without hurting.
Voices that stay soft.
A bed that will still be there
tomorrow night.

She wants to unpack.
To hang her drawings
on a refrigerator.
A family
that won't send her away
when she's sad,
when she's difficult,
when she remembers too much.

She wants what other children
don't know they have.

Her name is Molly.
And she likes dogs.

 

Parole Denied

He remains behind walls
built of concrete and consequence.
I remain behind walls
built of memory.

No guards watch my steps.
No judge signs my release.
Still, I scratch out days
in tally marks.

The door stands open,
I know this.
God, I know this.

And yet
I sleep with the light on,
as if freedom is a thing
I still haven't earned.

 

Ordinary Miracles

It's in the way you make me coffee
in my favorite blue cup,
one sugar, no cream,
and how mornings are easier
when I don't have to explain myself.

Plastic spoons scraping
the bottom of a Ben & Jerry’s pint,
knees touching on the couch,
laughing at nothing.
Cold sweetness,
and the shared understanding
that this is all we need.

It's your hand finding mine in the dark
and the way your voice says
It's going to be okay.
like it's not a guess,
like you already know the ending.

I don't ask for much.
I don't need to.
Just miracles,
disguised as ordinary days.

 

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once*

Somewhere, a glass falls off a table,
and somewhere else it doesn't.
A hand catches it.
A hand hesitates.
A hand was never there.

Every choice diverges.
Every yes scatters a thousand futures,
every no, a thousand more.
The world is a library,
every book read aloud
in different rooms
by different versions
of the same voice.

Right now
I am brave.
I am cautious.
I am staying,
because love feels stronger than fear.
I am leaving,
because fear feels stronger than love.

There is a universe
where words land differently,
where that night does not replay itself
a thousand times.

There is another
where the worst thing happened
and then something small and good
happened anyway.
A stranger with the right words.
A morning that didn't come.
A morning that did.

Grief is happening forever.
So is relief.
So is the moment I almost fell,
and the moment I did.
Somewhere, the version of me who hardened
is tying her shoes and dreading another day.
The version who didn't is writing a poem.
The version who jumped is still falling through the night.

If everything is happening,
then nothing is wasted.
Not the love that failed.
Not the life I didn't choose.
The hand I almost held.
Or the person I almost wasn't.

Somewhere, I am whole already.
Somewhere, I am still becoming.
Both are true.
Both are happening.
Both are everything.

Right now.

--

*Poem inspired by, and title borrowed from the (very weird) movie by the same name. Worth seeing, if you haven't, but it's not for everyone.

 

Sometimes I Watch Him Sleep

Nothing sacred.
Nothing to prove.
Just the simple miracle
of being here.

I lie awake, nowhere else to be,
while he sleeps with the confidence
of someone who knows
he's not alone in the world.

Love, I have learned,
does not arrive with trumpets.
Sometimes it shows up
barefoot in my kitchen,
morning coffee in my favorite blue cup,
the way his hand finds mine
even after letting go.

I watch him sleep,
whisper,
Are you ever afraid of tomorrow?
Knowing it will come anyway.
And the next day.

It's quiet.
Nothing is happening.
Everything is happening.

 

The Fifth Beatitude

They say forgiveness is a blessing,
as if it did not drag behind it
years of drowning.
As if it did not reopen
what you once sealed
to stay alive.

They say forgiveness opens doors.
Yet I stand at the doorway,
counting the cost.
Hinge rusted.
Key heavy in my hand.

If God forgives,
let Him grant me the grace,
not to absolve or excuse,
but to turn the key,
and not let That Man
decide who I become.

Blessed, maybe,
is the one who keeps walking,
even when grace
falls a few steps behind.

 

Mail-Order Forgiveness

The envelope arrives with no return address.
He knew I wouldn't open it if it bore his name.

Inside, his ragged handwriting asks
for understanding.
Explains the narrowness of choices,
how the long road bent him
until temptation justified his fall.

Please don't hate me.

He writes about finding God
behind prison walls.
About forgiveness.
About a clean slate.

But it's not the crime that still burns.
It's the aftermath.
The way my body still shakes
in memorized rooms
with no exits,
the half-life of a moment
that never finished happening.

I do not burn the letter.
I do not tear it up.
I place it back in its envelope
like a specimen slide.

I seal it shut,
put it in a drawer.
Then sit in the dark,
and feel nothing.

Forgiveness is not mine to counterfeit.

 

Sticks and Stones

Whore.
Rape Girl.
Slut.

Scrawled on a locker
in permanent ink.
Truth overwritten
by simpler stories,
rumors draped around my neck
like chains.
She wanted it.
She let him.

When you're thirteen,
words are everything.

But years pass,
ink fades
the way names do
when you stop answering.

Those words are nothing.
I know what happened.
I know what didn't.
And I was never
what they carved into me.

Sticks and stones, yes.
But those words
no longer get to tell me
who I am.

Free

When I was a child
the door would open like a mouth.
He would come in,
filled with his day's failures,
hands already curled
into the shape of my body.

No one teaches you
how to carry the weight
of a man who can't carry his own.
So I learned how to make myself small.
How to live underwater and not drown.

The day they took him away,
birds went on singing.
I sat in the grass
and felt nothing.
The sun pressed gently down
in place of the apology
he'll never give me.

And I breathed.

 

Before Me

Sometimes I talk to ghosts
I've never met.

No one wakes up one morning
and becomes that man.
So there must have been others.
Test runs.
A first time that taught him
how easy it was.

I think of them in passing,
like headlights on a dark road.
If I stay there too long
my stomach turns.
My hands shake.

What if one of them had spoken up?

People call me brave,
tell the story as if I'm the hero,
as if courage were the point.
As if I stood up
with a list in my hands,
counting all the future girls
I might save from him.

I didn't.

I spoke up because I was drowning,
and I finally grabbed the edge
of something solid.
Because my body was tired
of carrying his secret
like an iron shadow.

I wasn't thinking of justice.
I was thinking of air.
Of the next breath.
Of making it through the night.

If others were spared,
I'm grateful.
I hold that thought carefully,
like something fragile
that doesn't belong to me.

But the truth is simpler.
I didn't rise to save them.
I didn't rise for justice.
I was only trying
to save myself.

 

Approach

I tell myself it's safe.
This warmth.
This nearness.
Love.

My skin does not believe me.
I feel everything at once.
The drive to pull toward you
and the instinct to pull away.

My mind still scans for exits,
measures the distance to the door,
keeps one eye open
even as my body leans toward you.

When you stop just short of touching,
my skin burns with it.
With the almost.
With the question your hands ask
without asking.

I'm afraid of wanting this.
Afraid of how fast my body remembers
what my mind is slow to forget.
Afraid of how good it feels
to be touched
without being taken.

Still balanced between reach and recoil.
Still learning the shape of desire
without demand.

Still learning that touch
can arrive slowly,
and leave the door open
behind it.

 

Let Me Stay Asleep

This feels like a dream.
Not the frantic kind
that slips through your fingers,
but a soft, gentle one,
the kind that settles
into your world
and quietly rearranges the room.

It came without asking,
everything I once imagined
love might be.
It knows my corners.
It sits beside me
without trying to fix
the broken pieces.

Joy keeps finding me
in ordinary places.
A glance.
A smile held one second longer.
The soft certainty
of not being alone
inside myself.

What if I say it out loud
and the room dissolves?
What if naming this feeling
is the same as waking?

So I breathe carefully.
I whisper.
Everything is fragile
in a dream.

If this is sleep,
let me stay here
just a little longer.
Let me believe
that some dreams
are doorways.

And if I wake tomorrow,
let it be slowly,
with this feeling
still warm in my hands.

 

Good Girl

I open my mouth,
but the word falls
down my throat.

No.

Such a small word,
yet it feels
like rebellion.

It isn't easy,
unlearning a life.

Even now,
with the truth in my hands,
I hesitate,
weighing every word
like the wrong one might
cut me.

I know now
I don't have to bleed
to be worthy,
but still my voice
trembles at its own sound.

I am learning
to trust it anyway,
to know I can move forward,
speak plainly,
ask for what I want.

And still be a Good Girl.

 

If She Knew

He told her she was pretty
and she believed him,
as if that word were holy,
as if it came from a mouth
that knew truth.

She wore his words like silk.
He slipped past her defenses
with soft eyes, soft words,
his lips close to her ear.

No one warned her
that monsters whisper.

Time revealed
what she couldn't have known,
and it moves through me
like fire through a dry forest,
charring the brittle branches
of every lie he ever told.

Oh, if I could go back.
Not just to warn her,
but to stand beside her,
press into her small hand
the match she would need,
watch her strike it,
watch his whole false world
burn down around her.

But I can't go back.
I can only speak.
I can only drag his name
through my throat.
I can only say

He was a monster.

And I am still learning
how to live with that truth.

 

The Third Time, She Knew

I learned something terrible that night.
How a heart refuses to stop beating,
how a body clings to life even when the mind
has chosen death.

I stood there
holding the world together
with a towel and an iPhone,
thinking not of friendship or loss
but the cruelty of the road
she'd chosen.

They tell you
survival is a victory.
They do not tell you
how it brands the witness,
how the image keeps repeating itself
behind your eyes.

She lived.
She looked at me later
with borrowed time in her pocket,
and I thought,
surely this was enough.
Surely this was a promise
of never again.

The third time, she succeeded.
It was not her death that stunned me
but the realization that she knew.
She knew what it would do
to the ones left holding the scene,
to the ones who had already paid
with haunted dreams and trembling hands
from the first two tries.

I am told to forgive,
to call it illness,
to sand down my anger
until it fits politely in a sentence.

But some days
it stands up furious,
asking what kind of ending
requires rehearsal,
what kind of friend
demands witnesses twice
before closing the door.

I carry her absence.
I also carry this:
The truth that I was there,
and it still was not enough.

And I am allowed
to be angry
about that.

 

Not Quite Home Anymore

It smelled like crayons
and Sunday pancakes,
walls sometimes bright
with laughter and buzz
of ordinary days.

I learned heartache there
in the darkest nights.
Locked doors,
promises breaking
room by room.

I grew up carrying echoes,
patching the broken parts
with scraps of hope.

Now I find healing
in small places.
Counting cracks in the sidewalk
along Maple Street,
the old bench by the river,
a text from a friend: You okay?

I never thought
home would feel
like a place I don't belong.

Caught between worlds,
I keep walking,
carrying the pieces I left behind,
searching for the ones
that still fit.

 

Undo

You pencil a sketch
of who you might have been.
A gentler shape, maybe,
less wary, less wise.
You wonder if peace
was ever meant to come
without a cost.

If given the chance
to undo, unmake, unremember,
would you hesitate,
hand lingering over the switch?

Because even the scar
shines a little,
in a certain light.
Because sometimes surviving
is too much,
and still not enough.