Gather round boys and girls it’s storytime and I have a tale to tell. Once upon a time there was a girl. This girl did not know love, she didn’t know how to smile, she thought of laughter as a folktale and pain a reality. This girl gave life to rainforest, her irises the clouds swollen with her untold sorrows.

One day the girl who knew nothing but sadness met a boy. This boy was wonderful. This boy was the icing on the disaster and trauma truffle cake, the cherry on the suffering and shame banana split. He was the sun shining above the eye of the hurricane. To put it simply he was magic.

He introduced her to living. Showed her what it was like to fly, what it was a was like to breath above water. Then he introduced her to his fist. No longer flying but floating, she went from the sea to space trading drowning for suffocation. He trapped her in his gravity and tricked her into thinking she was weightless. Told her she wasn’t worthless as long as she had him, that she was made to be nothing without him. This boy turned her into a fraction of herself, and he was the dominator. This boy turned her face from brown, to red, to blue, to black, to purple, her body a rainbow featuring the colors of his anger. She became the canvas to his finger painting. He the master and she the puppet. He always pulled her strings to hard no matter what she said.

The girl grew tired. She didn’t have a choice she told herself, because if she did why would she choose to be a shell of the woman she once was. Her heart retreated and her smile vacated and her peace of mind took a long walk off a short pier. He destroyed her will. destroyed her spirits, destroyed hope. screw the rain forest, he caused her to turn deserts into oceans, drizzles into storms, New york is now Atlantis. There is no happy ending to this story boys and girls. She is still in his gravity. She still suffocates. He still pulls her strings, and her smile has not returned. And I’m starting to think it never will.