To the Next Person I Love

There will be a day I do not flinch When you go to reach for me That your hands will not Look like traps There will be a day that when you Yell at me I Will Not Crumble Disappear into the echoes Of your anger Turn myself inward Believe everything that Has been said Or will be Said about me Is the reason you will leave (Or already left) I know There will be a day that you hug me And I will not hold my breath That your arms will Not feel like caged bars And one day I may be able to sit still And let you hold me Without pushing back On an imaginary But not so Imaginary body That's already trapped me Without bracing myself For a hit I've already absorbed Without being afraid That this will happen again I am so afraid That you Will Swallow Me Whole That I may get stuck in your throat That no one will see me Without hearing your voice There will be days That I rip stories From body And hand them to you And my nightmare is the reason I'll never be enough man for you I am trying to make up for the man that I am not and What is being more man that not telling why there is a Rage fire burning eternally in my overreaction? Or Just not telling you how I feel? And what if I could just tell you? Tell you there are places inside of me That I need you to see in order to understand Why you can't hold my hand right now But you need to hold my hand right now That I will flinch When you touch me Because for 4 years of my life I was Chopped Down Every weekend While I was still learning How to rupture Growing is the Hardest thing I've ever learned To start doing Again Don't be mistaken I do not need you To pull me out Of myself I do not need you To try to counsel Me clean I know these marks Are permanent They've lived with me For as long as I want To remember And the bones In my abandonment Would turn to trembling Dust if they left People like me We don't bruise easy But we scar for lifetimes It's how we know we got out Alive and so fucked That here I am Talking poetry Warning to a person Or a version of myself That I'm not sure will ever even exist Imaginary Lover or Evolved Me- Can you love me With these scars and not flinch Will you exist one day to receive me? There will be a day that I explain That I've dressed myself in shame And silence like my best Shoes and shirt And i haven't worn much else That I have clawed my way out Of grief and an entire lifetime Full of people trying To kill me And I survived To get here That an "i love you" doesn't mean shit To me until you know All of this And you say it again I need to know If you will hold this And understand that this day Was a day I've been waiting for I've gone through so much Just to get here To this day To you Today