On My Way Home

It all starts when your 13, and all the girls they want to be queens. They all wanted to have crowns of gold and steal. They wanted to rule kingdoms that were their body’s and it all started out kind. I mean we were all just our mothers children, learning to love castles which already had canon holes that shattered our foundations and this is the age where we learn to walk home. Where our mothers sit us down and tell us about angry men and their hands and their words. Where my mother gave me a can of pepper spray and said Incase, she said incase. The first time I walked home with a tiara balanced on my head a shadow of a man followed me back and whispered ugly into my ears, and I believed him. So my crown fell, the jewels shattered on the ground along with my teardrops, my silken dress exchanged for armor, I wiped of my smile, and cleaned the blood that crusted my knee caps. I, I had to get back up the next day and do it all over again. But, I whispered to all the silent sins make me queen or I’ll make you scream. And they finally bowed down until their knees scrapped on the ground and bled all the horrid broken syllables that they yelled at me from the streets. I am not a whore, or a pretty little thing, or your “baby”, I am neither a **** nor your plaything, or something you can grab at with your grubby fingers as if I’m a toy. So I try and walk away now with a crown of broken mirrors resting gently on my hair. I hope that you see yourself in them, I hope you swallow your reflection, it mirrors your ugly crumbling hands that seem to shake when you drink your alcohol, it shows the reflection of your mother who still wonders why you sit on the streets when you could have been home helping her make dinner. But it doesn’t matter cause my mother will sit at home and her words of “be careful” will still echo in my footsteps on my way home, and I don’t know if anyone will hear them except maybe the pepper spray that guards my school bag and the girls that whisper of their fear in the locker rooms. I will walk a little faster, glancing over my shoulder as I go and I’ll wonder if anything will ever change.