[TW: Sexual Assault]

I started working out

At home, alone

On a sticky mat on my dust-clump floor

Stretch and push and crunch

Learn to hurt myself in more acceptable ways

Sweat heavy and sink beneath the surface of last decade's pop

Where I can be 13 years old

At the grade seven/eight Valentine's Day dance

Moving under a mirrorball with the boy I loved

Never more than a loose-fitting friend

The one I still love

It feels good until it doesn't

Until I go back to couch-slouching

Scraping murky movies from theflixer.tv into the gaps between my eyelids

Still awake at 6:30am

Head full of emails

And his fifty-nine-year-old cigarette-stained hands

On my hairy little twenty-year-old tits

Too gentle to be violence

Too gentle to be anything else

Choking on the sludge-stench of a twenty dollar bill on fire

It felt good until it didn't