they tried to fucking kill me

i was born to a man who didn’t want me.
but worse—he didn’t care.
indifferent to whether i was fed, warm, safe.
indifferent to the fact i even existed.

he saved his fire for my brother—
a boy raised on violence and praise,
taught that love was brutal,
that women are weak.

my mother—
she worked herself to exhaustion.
five jobs. five hundred worries.
no time for anything but keeping us alive.
she cared enough to try,
but survival leaves no room for anything else.

i was always alone.

because they fucking hated me?
like my father did.
like my brother did.
like every man after them.

they wanted me small.
silent.
grateful for the suffering they handed me.
they tried to kill every spark in me.

i should’ve known.
when the first man tore doors from their hinges,
drove 100 miles per hour just to watch me flinch.

then came the biggest projection i ever invented—
thinking what was in my chest was real.

i miscarried on the bathroom floor alone.
sobbing for the child who could’ve tethered me to him.
screaming like a wounded fucking animal, bleeding out.

i died too that day.
realizing i was just another body to fill his emptiness.
replaced by literally anyone.
he must have hated me too.

or worse—
he was always a hallucination.

so i ran.
straight into the arms of a man i knew could destroy me.
i thought if i could create something whole,
it wouldn’t matter that i never had been.

and then i saw my own version of my father.
i had found him.

he took me from standing to flat on my back.
head against the wood.
pregnant.
his hands around my throat—squeezing.
his fist against my skull—again. and again.

i carried his child and his rage at the same time.
eight months pregnant.
cleaning houses while hiding bruises.
a ghost of myself.

days before our daughter was born,
he put me in the hospital.
then totaled my car.

but the most hollowing act wasn’t the fists.
wasn’t the strangling.
wasn’t the blood.

it was when he spit in my face.

inches away,
with our daughter still inside me.

because to spit at something is to say:
you are nothing.

and if i was nothing—
i was something that could be erased.

so i ran.
back to my father’s house.
a place where i was never a child.
still just a thing.

and it was just as brutal as i remembered.

but there’s her.
and i would not let her know the childhood i had run from.

so i went home.
to the place i bought alone.
just in case i needed to escape.
not sure how i would survive—
only that i had to.

because they fucking hated me.

they tried to kill me.
they tried to break me.
they tried to make me disappear.

but i am still here.

and my daughter?
she will never ask:
"why does he fucking hate me?"

they tried to fucking kill me.
and they fucking failed.