Echoes of Self, Every Voice

With so much gratitude for this community, I want to share what this moment means. Your presence, your attention, and the way you showed up to read, to feel, to witness, turned this space into something that felt like shelter.

Here, being understood is not a luxury.
It is something we practice together.
It is a shared act of care.

This is a place where your voice can stretch and breathe.
A place that reminds you there is nothing wrong with wanting to be heard and it is not a request, but a given.

So with a full heart, I am honoured to announce the winner of my End-of-Year Contest: Fiona Bridges

A voice that chose presences over performance.

A piece that held truth like a pulse.

A truth that came through like a heartbeat.

I proudly present the winning piece.

Let it be heard.

With love always,

-imi 🤍

Every Voice

I have lived enough lifetimes in my Two Scores than should be allowed for any one soul.

When my memory wheel starts spinning, I shrink away.
I ache and burn for all the past versions of myself that I cherished.
These parts of me have been destroyed and taken from me against my will.

That is what walls and shields do.
They do not protect.
They erode.

That is what intimidation, hate, abuse, and rape does.
These things can rip you apart from the inside and destroy your illusions of everything good and decent.

You block away every nutrient needed for those precious things to survive.

The rose in the glass is an illusion.

When you finally hold that clipped weed in your hands, the only thing left will be thorns.

The rest of that once vibrant being had decayed long ago:

Care free, hopeful, non-conforming, fierce, brave, unshrinking, bubbly.

These are parts of me that I have feared for so long and kept them hidden behind closed doors, afraid to be too much.

But now I am letting them free.

Forty.

At the same time, there are echoes of my past lives that try to pull me down with rotting fingers:
Shame. Horror. Guilt. Remorse. Regret. Shame. Shame. Evil. Worthless. Shame.

They scream, “Don't forget what you did!”
“Don't forget you're not clean!”
“Don't forget you don't deserve to be here!”
“Don't forget!”
“We'll never let you forget!”

They try, but they won't bring me down.

Because, well, there's also those parts of me that have stayed buried.
The ones I put in the ground myself. Stomped down on those graves.
Chiseled the stones that mark them: Judgment. Ridicule. Weakness. Victim. Loser. Unworthy. Abused. Dutiful.

She cried out to me:
I am thinking of that sweet little five year old girl, trustingly spread her legs open wide when her brother asked her to.

“We're going to play a game” he said as he pulled out his BB gun.
I feel the sting as the bullet stings her “privates”.
I hear her scream as she runs to her mother for comfort, so ashamed to even speak aloud what he had just done.
Her mom doesn't even remember this now.

They always forget.
I will never forget.

She cried out to me:
That sweet little six year old girl, too weird, too hyper, too much.
No one played with her.

Except Jae.
Jae was her friend.
And Jae told her that Jae’s brother touched her.
“It really hurts” she tells Fiona.
And when Fiona tells her mother, her mother tells her to forget what she said and never speak to Jae again.
But she doesn't forget.

Her mother did.

Abandonment and fear.
The shame of what she did.

35 years later I finally understood why five years later Jae had been so cruel to me when I had reached puberty 2 years faster than everyone else her age, and didn't fit into the body I had found myself in.

She turned against me and I became her prime target of her hatred and abuse.

I was told as an adult, she became a victim of severe addiction and lost her children.

She cried out to me:
That 11 year old girl bleeding into the toilet, bleeding through her shorts on skate night.
My future brother in law had to lay out towels for me in the back seat as I sobbed into my hands.

I had to wear my mother's clothes.
I shopped in the Woman's plus sizes because my tits were bigger than Dolly's and I couldn't afford custom made rhinestone ensembles.

They didn't make triple D training bras at The Limited, Too.

The kids were so cruel. They mocked me and beat me down.
Every day they asked me to show them my tits and prove I didn't stuff my bra.

My dance studio instructor asked my mom to stop bringing me to dance because of how I looked in the tight spandex compared to all the little tiny girls prancing around on stage.

“The material is getting expensive”, my mom claimed, not knowing I had overheard their whispered conversations.

My mom doesn't remember.
They never remember.

She cried out to me:
The 11 year old whose mom was no longer present.
Who'd been frayed by the mental illness of my brother, her middle child.
The only ways in which she showed up was to ridicule and with a belt.

All throughout my teenage years I had to hide the welps and scars on my legs and back.
My mom never cared where the belt found it's mark.

I once had to wear a scarf to school.
My mom doesn't remember.
They never remember.

She cries out to me:
The young wife who has found herself trapped in a cycle of narcissism and abuse.
That version of me lived a life far from all the others.
Ten years. Isolation, abuse.
Stayed there too long.
Holding on to a promise from Heaven that everything would work out.

She cries out to me:≤≥¿¿¿
That same young wife who puts on a sexy outfit for her husband.

I tried to dance for my…
My abuser.
He tells me I'm too fat and it is “just gross”.
“Learn your place in this world”, he tells me.
“No one will ever want to see you do that”

She cries out to me:
The woman who cannot change her husband.
The woman who left but now crushed under the weight of her soon to be ex husband after he broke into her house and raped her.

I hear her sobbing.
I hear her struggling and pushing him off of her when he's done. I hear her screaming for him to leave.

She cries out to me:
The woman trying to date again.

I thought going on a date with a police officer would be safe.

I hear her sobbing and labored breathing, as she's being squeezed tight, pinned against a man on the bed, a forced “little spoon”.

I was held by force by a man four times my size after he ripped off his condom and started to choke me as he came inside of me, without my consent, as he screamed…

“I hope you get pregnant!"
“I hope it fucking ruins your life!
“I will drive you to the abortion clinic and force you to terminate your precious baby and then fuck you all over again!”

I hear the echoes of her sobs being cut off by her struggle to breath as he continues to squeeze her throat.
I hear her now, right before she escapes when she feels his grip loosen for a moment.

This was right after he told me he fantasizes about killing women.
And he was fantasizing about killing me.

She cries out to me:
The woman who never reported him.
The woman who is still afraid of what he might to do to her if she tells someone.

I've purposely forgotten his name, but I'll never forget his face.
I still tense up every time I pass the neighborhood in which part of me was ripped away.

She cries out to me:
The young mom, manic and in so much pain, driving at midnight with her four year old in the car, speeding towards a man she just had to convince that he loved her.
This one is the one that hurts the most after all of these years.
I became a danger to the person who was the most important person on this planet to me.
Blinded by alcohol, shame, and so so so much pain.
It hurt. It hurt so bad.
I made it to his house, but at what cost?

He didn't love me then, and he never would. But I had to live with the shame of the terrible decision I had made. I promised myself I would always live with that guilt and shame so that I would never EVER do anything like that again. Depression and mania fueled by rage and alcohol is a pretty wild combination. Do NOT recommend. I became a different person. I will never allow myself penance.

That pain and the mania that it brought on is the most painful thing for me to remember.

She cries out to me:
The girl waking up on the rubber mattress after that pain had brought her to her knees.

I hear her ROAR.

She cries out to me:
Crying out in remembered pain, seeing the picture of him with a woman and her son, blasted on his social media. Seeing what she had lost.

He used to tell me he would never put someone else's child on his pages: the excuse he made to keep me hidden.
He told me he was never going to get married.

I mourns for the love I lost of his child, his daughter. I loved her like my own. A part of my life lost forever to someone else.

What hurts is the acknowledgement that it was never mine to begin with.
And I hear her crying out to me now.

The girl who has survived.
The one who has learned this life is too short to be miserable.

Echoes. Echoes of women, of the human that I used to be.

They all make up the woman I am today.

Every line. Every wrinkle. Every fold. Every scar. Every memory. Every voice.

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