Time is a Liar

The ceiling is far away, a shroud of plaster and shadow,
and I am twenty-two, a woman grown,
yet I am small again, so impossibly small.
My hands are wings locked over my crown,
a cage of bone to shield the memory of a blow
that never really stopped landing.

The air in the room has curdled.
A fist meets a jaw, the sound is wet, a heavy thud—
and suddenly the floorboards are the same floorboards from before,
the ones that tasted of salt and my mother’s jagged breath.
Then, it was a man with heavy boots;
now, it is a ghost with a familiar face,
the violence is an inheritance I never asked to claim.

I am curled in the dark, a frantic, shivering question mark.
My lungs are tethered to a collapsing house,
hyperventilating, trying to swallow the gravity of the room.
I am paralyzed by the echo of a shattering plate,
the phantom trajectory of a chair,
the way the light curdles when a hand is raised in anger.

Time is a liar. It says I am older,
that the reach of his shadow should have faded,
but it is etched into the marrow,
a recurring fever, a gothic stain.
I am shaking, still shaking,
trapped in the theater of my own synapses,
where every strike is the first one,
where the fear is an ancient, hungry guest
that refuses to leave the table.

I am twenty-two, and I am a child,
witnessing the world break itself all over again.
The violence is a language I speak fluently,
and god, how I wish I were mute.
I am afraid.
I am always, always afraid.