She Forgot Her Own Name

She met a man who carried storms in his mind,
But it wasn't the storms that broke her,
It was the way he chose to let them fall on her,
He loved with clenched fists and sharp words, then swore that she was the dangerous one for crying,
"You're playing the victim," he'd say
While she stood counting bruises like rosary beads, praying that one day they would stop appearing,
"It doesn't hurt"
As if pain could be argued away,
As if her trembling hands were fiction,
As if the purple beneath her skin were only shadows, she imagined,
He convinced her that every tear was manipulation,
Every boundary was betrayal,
Every plea for kindness was proof that she was impossible to love,
His diagnosis was never what left fingerprints on her arms,
His choices did,
And still she stayed,
Long enough to forget the sound of her own laughter,
The colours of her own dreams,
The woman she had been before surviving him became a full-time job,
She stopped looking in mirrors,
Not because she feared what she would see-
But because she no longer recognized the stranger staring back,
Then one quiet morning she noticed something,
The bruises were fading,
The silence was gentle,
For the first time in years, no one was telling her that her pain was pretend,
She whispered her own name like it belonged to someone she was meeting for the first time,
And little by little,
The girl he tried to erase,
Became the woman,
He could never break.