Social Media destruction

Nothing like the past knock-knock-knocking on your door.

Knew I should have gotten a louder “fuck off” doorbell.

Thought I burned that bridge long ago and now find that there’s some sort of vine growing out of the wreckage and trying to curl itself around my neck.

I thought that scar was a faint white impression of the wound it once was. But there’s some scab left to be picked.

It’s simple words on a screen that lend power to the climbing foliage. To pick at the surface of skin.

I have only myself to blame.

For many months I’ve debated on deactivating my Facebook account. Honestly, if there was a way I could simply use the messenger and not anything else, I would more likely do it. It’s the messenger I don’t want to part with. The main way I communicate with friends I’m not physically close to (like ones I know through this community!).

Today while updating my profile picture to something a bit more festive, I somehow accidentally caused my timeline to switch to 2006.

I should have immediately closed out.

A sane person would.

This jigsawed brain made the decision to continue scrolling. Scrolling through a smattering of words from a period of my life I’d long tried to purge from my being.

Words include lame jokes with friends. Basic life updates about school and work.

And posts from Her.

I have moved multiple times since my 5 year relationship with Katherine, but it still haunts me. Almost daily. I love my current house. So very much.

And yet at night my dreams are permeated with the rooms I lived in with Her. The house I lived at with Her. There is no rhyme or reason.

I barely dream of my current partner at all. I don’t understand this flawed thinking at all.

And now it isn’t even just my subconscious.

I don’t understand why I scrolled. Why I took that screenshot. Why I saved it. Why I include it in this post.

Social media is a toxin. A dangerously addictive substance beyond heroin, meth, or alcohol. It speaks sweetly and dresses up flawlessly. But behind those honeyed words and slick threads is a sinister hole of festering stink.

And I don’t even mean the vindictive way they use profiles for marketing. Note your interests. Or track “trending” topics.

I mean how it harbors a storage of memories you didn’t even know still remained. Memories to be purged. You recklessly thought you’d never have to see again.

A simple click.

Words across a page.

A Scar Means…

“I ask you right here please to agree with
me that a scar is never ugly. That is what
the scar makers want us to think. But you
and I, we must make an agreement to defy
them. We must see all scars as beauty.
Okay? This will be our secret. Because
take it from me, a scar does not form on
the dying. A scar means, I survived.”

—	“Little Bee”, Chris Cleave

Possession

Trigger warning for sex/BDSM/abuse talk
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Somehow in all our teasing, flirting lighthearted talking last night, Army convinced me to text him a picture of me in stockings with garters.

I’ve never done such a thing before.

I’m sure that seems surprising, with Charlotte’s sexual nature.  I’m not 100% sure that she’s never slipped out a risque pic to some stranger that meant nothing but pure sex, but I can say pretty confidently that I’ve never sent such pictures to anyone who meant anything to us.

I was nervous about it, and to his credit, he wasn’t being pushy.  It was that gentle sort of prodding that got me to finally gather up some of that elusive courage and manage something relatively sexy.

It was pretty much just my legs crossed in stockings with the garters peeking at the top.  No face, nothing X-rated.  Just in case it were to find it’s way into the public eye.

And I still worried.  Something tugged at the corner of my mind.

My fingers moved on their own.

“Just yours, right?”

He texted back almost immediately.

“Only mine. No sharing.”

My brain seemed to explode.

Voices started screaming at me.

Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. No sharing. No one else. No touching. Mine.

A cascade of memories of Katherine’s games of possession and branding wash over me.

I touch my left hip nervously.  The scar is very faint now.  That means I’m no longer branded, right?  I don’t belong to her.  I’m not breaking it.  Not violating the pact.

She violated it first.

But she was never marked.  She could do as she pleased.

Only me.

I am the property.  I am the girl.  I am the claimed.

I am nothing.

It

It curls
A dark and slinky cat, winding about your ankles

It claws
A thorny pocket-sized monster, fitting perfectly into that hole in your chest

It cries
Louder than a banshee on her best day, louder than a lost child on its worse

It hurts
Sometimes a simple reminder, like a papercut; sometimes a deep wound, like a gunshot

It scars
You can sing and smile and talk and shop and laugh and wash and scrub, scrub, scrub-
and tell everyone it’s not there

But it is

Picture of me taken by an artsy-photography friend in high school. It’s sort of ironic considering the self-harm I struggle[d] with (though never on my wrists).

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A poem I composed a couple years ago that’s describing some of various struggles I’m dealing with right now….