Preface: This is a work of fiction. Trigger Warning includes mentions of Violence, Eating Disorders and adult content. (If you're my sister, stop reading).
Completed in August 2025 this was my first spoken word ever! I've always been a public speaker but I still get choked up performing this.
I am a multidisciplinary artist and always have been Writer before Photographer. One feeds the other.
An Apology in The Mirror:
(A letter addressing all the people I talk to in my head)
I feel the lack of a safety net. I bought a bag with it. “Things were meant to be different”, I keep saying in the mirror yet my eyes confess defeat. A part of me argues hope as the rest of me sinks into despair. I told you this wouldn’t happen again. You don’t want me but I can’t save any more numbers so I fill my drawers with more new underwear that you don’t want to see. I used to be so possessive of what was mine. I would have liked to keep you. I wanted to be kept.
I feel like I'm losing the game. The less I feel I have, the more I find myself clawing for more. There are things and people my heart still craves so deeply. Empty air I keep on clutching. New bags on old shelves.
You will always leave. You are all the same when you leave. You like being away. I don’t know what’s quite mine anymore. Can I keep your voice? Will you box it up for me?. I told you you dropped the ball and you looked me in the eye and kicked it out of your court.
You shout at me to take care of myself but all I hear is the shouting. There is love in your eyes but the frustration looks like him and I can’t see you. You push a plate towards me but there is a dead bird on it. The skin is in my hands. Feathers all around us. The blood is all over you but you tell me it’s not real and I breathe through the smell. It’s not real. You’ve always smelled like sin.
I’m walking on the tracks the train of my life derailed from. I pass the ghosts of the people I wanted to stay close to in different worlds and I feel their distance like a physical presence now. My hands always feel empty. There’s a building pressure in my chest. There are so many people I don’t speak to anymore whom I write letters to in my head. My heart aches almost continually. You are everyone that has ever hurt me. Everyone that reached for me just to dig their nails in and tear out my heart through my mouth. My nightmares have always been about losing. I can’t tell you that I don’t sleep anymore, you’d be worried. In my dreams he noticed.
You look at me with eyes that are so worried when I am in their periphery. Your concern makes me feel a little warm and sick to my stomach. There is an intrinsic need in me for affection and love in ANY form. I won’t let you pity me. You notice I don’t eat.
I keep having to tell myself that love acquired the wrong way, will never be love. A part of me seeks fulfillment and safety and every other part of me denies it. At the end of things I find myself choosing only what hurts me. All my feelings are trying to tell me to look inward and unburden the chaos I have let my heart live in. The webs I have woven to protect myself from a fate I am trying to escape; One I know too closely.
I am becoming alone in my pursuit of trying not to be. Your work voice gets me wetter than when I’m on my knees. You tell everyone what to do except me. I can’t seem to do the right things for you.
You ask me questions I can’t answer. Me undressing my wounds would kill you. The same patterns, the same cycles, the same cruelty as each bandage comes off, the kind of attachment I have been trying to escape follows me everywhere (or am I looking for it?) even in the most unlikely places, in the most unseemly people. I wouldn’t repeat the patterns but I would always anticipate them. Wait for you to become him. I lost my glasses. I wouldn’t see you but you’ve always shown up. You washed blood off of my forehead.
I tell myself I want love but what I really want is to be understood. I need to be present in a way that makes the chaos in my life melt away. I need you to look me in the eyes and tell me to dig my feet into the ground. I am looking, continuously, for an escape. What am I running from?
I feel an innate sense of being neglected, and I am trying to crawl out of this hole by any means necessary, EVEN if I have to crawl over my own dead body. I am escaping every day. My demons are in my blood. There is chocolate and blood stains all over my white bedsheet. My bed smells like blood, chocolate and incense. My bathroom looks like a crime scene. I am trying so desperately to make this a home. I scrub my skin after the tub. My teeth are bleeding. I keep listening to Father Figure.
All I want is to be rubbed clean. I am nursing my wounds with petty cash. You’re guarding me. I walk away. The rain is falling directly into my eyes.
I close my eyes and open my palms and envision how I would like them to be filled. Why do they feel empty? What do I need? I keep shouting in my younger self’s face, “WHAT DO YOU NEED?” She cries in my arms but my teenage self responds. “Love. All of it” and I can’t give it to her so I buy her another bag.
I feel guilty for stemming her spiritual growth. I feel shame every time I feel her presence. Her anger: her hurt. Maybe she would have been loved if I hadn’t lost those last 30 kgs. I will never forgive myself for giving her an eating disorder. Sometimes I still look in the mirror and blame my double chin for everything, just like my mother did. “It means you’re still alive” I keep breathing shakily into the mirror, my fingers search for meaning in the eyes that stare back. I am looking out into the rain from my apartment in Paris. You’ve figured out my relationship with food. You’re not here but you’re looking at me.
The space around me is heavy with teardrops that are wet and warm like rain. My hands are cold and my fingers type incessantly. Something needs to come out. Something I’ve been trying to get out for years. A helplessness. A plea. A need to be taken care of.. Not in the way I alone can. There are some limits I have to come to terms with and this is one of them. I AM TOO BIG TO TAKE CARE OF. You picked me up effortlessly the first time you came over. You tossed me onto my bed like it was nothing.
The sun is shining only in my eyes and the universe acknowledges my unspoken plea. There is so much to be grateful for and so so much to grieve. I tell you I’m editing but I’m writing feverishly. The grief sticks to the walls around us. You’re mourning something too.
There’s a sense of reverence behind the camera. I can see the photos reflect how I look at you. The intimacy of seeing you. There’s shame and love in every glance I steal. I ask you to look away. You stare directly at me, your gaze fixed above the camera. You want to love me and yet you don’t.
There are ways I can feel that I’ve grown. The energy signature that I don’t recognise. Calm men. A dedicated presence, kind eyes. I have prioritised chaos and connection over warmth and support.
I am getting older. There are people who take to me almost instantly. I feel the difference in how I walk. I can be charming too, almost as charming as you were. Sometimes I hear men speak the way you used to and I realise how sophisticated you were.
I have always had a taste for you after you were gone but I never trusted sophistication again. Cruel behind closed doors. You taught me to accept cruelty. You taught me to be cruel. You taught me to teach lessons. To fight. To ask men who come after you to kill for me. He shines a light behind the washing machine and I wish it was you holding the stick. You were only violent to me. Not a hand raised yet utter devastation delivered in the split of a second.
I want to be still.
The softness in your eyes is cruel. It makes me chuckle to myself. You are just what he taught me. The only thing I can accept. You smile at me with hate. There’s no version of this story where I walk away without spilling blood. I have to turn away before I catch your eye as you’re tearing into my neck with your bare teeth, tearing me ear to ear. I keep waking up in cold sweat. I called you over last night.
I want to write letters talking to you. All of you. There is a deep sense of devotion I have made myself swear off because you stole the sanctity from my love. I can’t talk to some of you again but there’s so much I have to say so this is what I do instead. I talk to you all at once the way you are in my head. Constant voices I love that haven’t given me grace. There is only one voice missing that I hear only when I open my mouth. You’ve all left my life but you’re still here. In my head.
I have more people to love. Begone. You left a musky scent. New old shoes from someone else’s closet that they gave up for half price. Not mine and not yours. I can look away.
New things I notice every day. A new energy signature. Is it you? The one? You tell me that skirt looked good on me but you didn’t take it off with your teeth. I tell you I forgot but I will always remember the way you make the cartoon angry face when you’re confused or mock angry about too much salt or the way you bite the end of your glasses when you’re frustrated and turned on. There are mannerisms you’ve left behind that I look for in other people every day. There’s a hole you’ve left that I fill every day with blood as it gapes larger. Take my life so I can be yours in some way.
The cherry blossoms outside my window bloomed and fell and the leaves are green again but no word has come from you still. I know you’re watching. I look for you whenever I open my eyes but I am tormented by you when I close them. The cruelty I endured at your hands surfaces when I look in the mirror sometimes and I notice you in the running mascara, black eyes and bruises on my breasts that don’t exist anymore and haven’t for a long time.
The seasons have come and gone. How else will I remember you? Only you would understand the torment and the agony that comes with missing what we had. The only word present when the world closed in on us was the name of God (as I was looking at him in your eyes). The sweet godliness of the games. The love and the heavy grief. Orgasms and belly crying. The constant ache in my heart and between my legs. The way I could have only loved you at nineteen.
At twenty one I have made peace with our story but I remember, just like you. There was something distinct and serene about you yet something so utterly animalistic in the way you had me and the way I gave myself to you.
At twenty two I have loved someone else and he’s good at games. You told me I was a wounded bird once. I didn’t realise you loved me for my blood. No one looks to see if you’re hunting the bird you saved. He feeds me just to starve me. You loved me just to leave me.
Sometimes it’s easier putting pen to paper, knowing your fingers will never graze the corners of these pages. Only mine will, away from the digital graveyard of thoughts I’ve had about you and written to you. I’ve told you I’ve loved you over and over and you’ve never heard a word. You think I’m just a girl but I am as cruel as we come. As within, so without. I will tear myself apart before I ever let you see it in my eyes. I have forgiven my own flesh and blood. You will not get another chapter you didn’t ask for.
You will always be agonisingly private, a cruel joke between the universe and me. I think about the fact that my first love was meant to feel like a homecoming and yet there you were. Someone whose cruelty I recognised. I can sometimes physically feel the phantom urge to reach for you again. Sometimes I succumb to the urge and reach my palm out. All I ever got from you was emptiness. The dreams that I had where I was calling for you and you came. Even in my dreams I knew I wasn’t going to see you again. The worst nightmares I’ve woken up from were voids. Complete emptiness after everything had ended. It took entire days to feel the oxygen fill my lungs again. He spoke to me softly and the world got quiet around me.
I will still think about who I was to you. Who was your Anisha? You called me by my name even when I was standing right in front of you. My attention was always on you. You still called me by my name, almost possessively. You used to call me. I waited for your calls every day.
There was something beautiful about getting into a story knowing how it ends. It was always going to end like this, in absentia.
I lost you and realised I have always wanted more from life. Glamour and Soul. I want to win. There are names I can’t look at anymore because you made me feel lesser than them. They were smaller than me. There are letters I have written to your God before I wrote them to you. I think about you a lot. I think about you with a lot of fondness and regret. I don’t like who I was to you.
I keep begging for softness. I am on my hands and knees in the bathroom. You put me on my knees at the foot of the bed. There are days I see God when my eyes roll up and sometimes it feels a lot like you. Smells like you. So deliciously wrong for me to know. So ill fated.
I have loved before you and I have loved after you. They have always been villains. My eyes in the mirror are those of a villain. We can suffer through this together. A lonely fate. Opposite ends of the same couch. An entire world apart and so so so sad. Completely raw. Skin open. I’ll let him peel every layer until he eats my heart raw. I’ll let you feed me to him.
You’re all the same men. He swears he’s better but numbers don’t lie and he would know. He counts to ten before he suffocates me. He lets me choose when. You watched me eat. You watched me not eat. You were both cruel.
You were in my nightmares and I? I’m just a girl that writes with blood. I told you I loved you but what I really said was an apology in the mirror.
