Use to Be

I am walking, so quietly, along the floorboards attempting not to creak any of them while you sit. I have physically begun to tiptoe from so many months of walking on eggshells when I am near you. Your presence affects my being. The very chemistry of you walking into a room that am I in makes me cower and retreat inward without even the slightest sound of your very breath. Who is this hollowed woman…no girl that plays hide and seek behind these long thick lashes. Who is this unrecognizable being that stands in front of me applying her lip gloss and fixing her strands…as if it even matters. I pretend to hold some inner goddess like power in my presentation of myself, but you and I both know you never notice. It doesn’t matter, my beauty, whatever is left of it that is, has absolutely no power over you. I hold no weight in your ring. Sitting here studying my hands, small and frail, much like my backbone these days. My voice has whittled down to a whisper and I practically crawl on the ground in how low I stay feeling. I use to be solution oriented, when I knew what up looked like.

I use to be a fighter, but can one call herself a fighter when they’ve exited the fight and are merely shrinking within their robe and their gloves don’t fit anymore? Can they? Can I? I am no one, walking nowhere, moving through the air without even a shift in the wind. In the moments where you are not present, I exist. There is proof that I am a real, live person. But in any other moment, any other second of the day, I am a face that acts as a shell, that once housed a force, that forfeited her strength and traded it in for air, which has now been depleted. I am a dead eye that use to shine bright, but now express nothing. I am a heart that shrunk in its cage that keeled over to the floor, I don’t live here anymore.