Short Story - Ghostwriting

“How are you doing? I heard a bit about what happened, it must’ve been so hard.”

Four sympathetic faces staring at me. Waiting for for me to unleash my tragedy on them, as if my trauma could spill out of me like blood from a wound and be made clear through simple words. They don’t realise my wounds are invisible, and not even the 171,476 words in the English Dictionary could adequately describe my pain.

“It’s been….”

Four expectant faces. Their obvious desire to be the ones who slap a plaster on my wound.

“Hard.” I shrug.

Inside I want to scream out, tell them what you did to me, how you filled me with hope and shattered it.

I want to tell them how you stole my future, years of my life, made me miserable, destroyed my self esteem. How I’m now years behind my generation, trying to catch up.

How many milestones did I miss out on because of you? You did everything you could to deny me even the slightest happiness.

You convinced me that my talents weren’t worth pursuing, that I’d be much better off devoting myself to you. All I needed was a part-time job to get by, and then You. So I discarded my dreams, set them aside like a chewing gum wrapper, and focused on You.

You stripped away my personality - “you don’t need that anymore” - and forced me to put on the new and improved one. I had to submit to You, accept your opinions as truth. I suppressed my thoughts, I didn’t need them anymore.

How you inflated every single inch of my body with guilt, until I burst. It was like carrying a heavy sack, day

after day

after day

after day.

You even made me feel guilty about being abused. But how could You not? You were the very definition of abuse. Those fingers tearing apart my insides were my fault. How could I allow that to happen to your possession? I apologised to You. I accepted the blame.

There was no room for empathy in your icy embrace.

And when I finally unshackled myself, escaped your web of control and deception, what did You do?

You took them away. My family. My friends. The few people I had left.

“You have nobody to blame but yourself.” Your voice echoed. “You knew what would happen if you left me.”

You took all of this from me, and more.

You must pay for your sins.

You.

God.

god