A sort of detached look on her face. Broken. No one glances beyond the scars. Perhaps the scars protect her, but I’m pretty sure they protect me. As if what she has been through is too much.
Shards of glass fill her eyes. If someone gets too close, she has the power to push them away with a mere glance or a stare.
“That will teach them,” she thinks. “That will keep him form hurting me again.”
And I sit with her for a while, because too long is more than I can bear.
I sit with her and wonder what it is like to be loved with detached arms. To be handled with “care”. To be raised by a system that has your “best interest” in mind, but never really understood what that was in the first place.
Best interest.
Best interest of who?
The placing agency? The protective services? The attorneys? The counselors? The parents?
All enter her life to supposedly make it a better place…so why doesn’t this place feel better?
Why does she sit in a stark barren room with nothing on the walls and emptiness in her heart? Why does she sit alone? Is this really best interest? Is this really the better her heart has longed for?
Because this feels cold and dark and incredibly alone.
And if her tiny heart could tell you one thing, this is what I think it would say…
Don’t love me with detached arms, like some sort of mechanical operated system that is in charge of keeping all my ducks in a row. Sometimes my ducks don’t want to line up. Sometimes my impracticality needs to hang out and run free. I desperately need to know that this is okay.
That what has happened to me isn’t too disgusting or nasty to go unnoticed by your eyes. That you will not let me fall by the waste side. That you will not throw me away or pretend you don’t notice.
Don’t hold me with broken hands that detach at the wrist and never give way to the heart. Hold me with real hands. Real hands connected to real love.
Love that says I get it. Love that says you don’t have to hide it away for me. Love that won’t leave me in the dark.
Hands that hold. Real hands. In all my life I have never felt these kinds of hands.
They say they exist. I just really don’t know. And I’m even more terrified that if I find them…someone will snatch them away. Certainly I a not deserving of these types of hands.
So I’ll sit here with my glass eyes glazed a thousand times over so that you can’t see me. And maybe you have real hands. Real hands that aren’t leaving or hurting. And if you do, I’ll think about letting you in.