I want to preface this and I don’t. Somehow I have words in side of me and yet getting them out of me is so hard. I don’t know if this is worth reading or not.

Sitting on the floor, hair still wet from the bath that was not as soothing as intended. Can anything be soothing enough for this pain?
Face wet. Not from the bath though—wet from the river of tears that cannot be dammed. Unattractive as it is, snot flows freely. No dainty or delicate weeping for this sturdy girl.
Broken coping mechanism piled upon broken coping mechanism. No matter the house the posture is always the same: in a corner, maybe furniture pushed out from the corner to create a small hiding place. Hiding and rocking with her head beating the wall. She wants to hit harder but fears punishment if she damages the wall. Sometimes she looks around the room but mostly she stares at one spot. It is different in each hiding spot. Once it was a small turtle formed by the strange irregularities in the paint on the ceiling. Now it is the collage of color created by book bindings too blurry to read without glasses. Always hunched over with her knees against her chest. Sometimes the neighbor pounds on the wall and screams for the noise to stop. So she stops hitting her head.
Instead she stares at the ceiling and wonders how to lessen the pain in another way. She could go take sleeping pills and just pretend the misery isn’t happen—escape from it into her dream world. That isn’t a good idea though because the dreams are often worse than the waking world and if she takes pills then she is at the mercy of her dreams, much like some lame horror movie really. Should she drink? Mmmm sweet succor of alcoholic numbness. But no, she cannot go down that road for she hates those who walked it before her. In this way she wants the road less traveled, though she wonders about the road not taken. She knows that hidden deep within a drawer in a container buried in a cupboard lies sweet relief. She knows where that scalpel is.
Long ago it was hidden down where an innocent bystander is unlikely to find it. Someone rooting around for a towel or an asprin or a tampon just won’t find it. They have to know where to look or be as nosey as she is herself in other people’s homes. Sometimes she thinks about rooting around in other people’s bathrooms looking for their hidden shame but she has never done it. That veneer of civility is necessary for the survival of society and though she is a transgressor she will not cross that line. It isn’t because she is afraid of crossing lines—it is because she knows how hard everyone clings to their mask of being ok and she doesn’t want to hurt anyone by letting them know that she sees through their lies.
Lies are why she is here. Always lies. Lies telling her that she is stupid and to blame for all the horrors imaginable. She knows they are lies but yet they feel true; they feel true in that way that a lie can when you have been told it all of your life, when you sucked it down with your mother’s milk. She is worthless—not because she is a girl, this isn’t that kind of culture, but because she will not believe in the future that has been foretold for her. She will not be one more cog in the machine grinding away at a minimum wage job always whining about how life isn’t fair. Don’t get me wrong—she will whine about life not being fair. But she will say this because she doesn’t have the fairy tale, not because she doesn’t have the basics.
Basics are a safe place to live where you will not be evicted. Basics are enough food and warmth and clothes that do not need to have seems patched for the 15th time. She has those things. She just longs for the rescuer, the one who will make it all better.
No, not some stupid Prince. She doesn’t need one of those.
She just wants a mommy and a daddy. But even with all her brains and ambition and talent and success she can’t have what she wants.

Because life isn’t fair. So here she sits. It doesn’t matter if she is 4 or 14 or 24. She still hides alone in the dark and cries. She still pounds her head trying to beat out the agonizing pain contained within. At least the neighbor isn’t screaming yet.