Poem: Sweetheart

“Because you have a full and exciting life to get to,”
the most loving words, he only told me at the end,
“so much potential ahead of you; don’t fuck it up,”
my older brother father figure from the front page of pornhub.

And I miss him like a little kid.

I’ve always had an ick for age gaps.

The historical checkpoint, measurement, and marker,
when those American towers came down, he described to me
the day I had my first spoons of baby food, he remembered.

He was in a band when I was born.

But Nosferatu has lived with me since I was five,
and I came to him for help with the exorcism
that left me empty for God, or any other Demon to
possess me again.

He said when he met me he was bored.

Clammy cards held out from my chest, I prayed
for the lord to finally send me an angel; to protect me.
He delivered, instead, that feminine rite of passage:
my very own coming of age Becoming Lolita.

I hate him for what he did.

My lord and saviour I turned to for guidance, led me to
a few months of acting out and losing self.

His oedipus self-fulfilling prophecy of fear:
“I don’t want to let you down, I’m worried
I’ll take advantage of you.”

I hear the way his voice gives out in his last “I love you.”

He drives down the highway, sober and carefully
skirting an emotional collapse, breaking down
in silent tears, I witness, as he cries to himself.

A life of self-destruction, in a series of self-sabotage.
I was only the latest sin in his worship of false idols.

I was just an escape for his pain,
to funnel his grief, a quick fix drug hit,
replacement methadone

You’ve got a wife and kids.
Don’t know why you even need me.

for the ex-wife he’s still married to,
has been, for half my life span,
since I was 11, when he was my age now.

And the daughter he shared with her,
born while I was in high school,
who watched me from the walls,
while I got on my knees for him.

If I get to step 3, will you give me your babies?
If I’m so special, why am I secret?
Do you regret the things we shared that I’ll never forget?
Didn’t learn a damn thing from you.

A year, today, I flew to Hull.
It was dreary, dead, and dull.

The ghost of girlhood I dressed up in,
haunts me persuasively to yearn for a return,
to the denouement of months spent
dancing along nicely in delusion.

The tide recedes, the shore shows face,
I write useless poetic bullshit because

Because when you placed your sanity in trust,
had it shattered if you didn’t hold it in place,
you made god out of a loser you now can’t let go.

All the amends he attempted to grant undoing,
won’t carve out the parts where you inhaled him.

He was oxygen I lived by,
my mouth goes dry,
he makes me want to die.

March 15th, 2025. I tell my boss I can’t come in for work this week, I cross my name out of the building’s laundry calendar, and I spend my last money on a spontaneous one-way ticket to hull. I was going to kill myself in greg’s house. Greg is a registered sex offender, twelve years older, divorced dad I met in an online twelve step recovery group.

He was supposed to help me.

He was supposed to help me recover.

He destroyed me.

Literally. I came out of the situation in a psychosis so severe I’d forgotten who I was. The situation between us had felt like such an affront against god that we spiralled into an isolation that severed me from my social face. Yet I had to keep convincing myself that it was a gift from the universe, I had to get to hold it as a good thing, because I could not allow the betrayal of my faith this time.

Over and over in my life, I have put my trust in people, especially older people, like a baby duckling, seeking a mentor. For once, for once, I needed the universe to prove I was worth guidance. That someone older and wiser might look at me and see a soul sacrosanct of supportive fostering. Instead of an opportunity to steal something self-serving from my inexperienced vulnerability.

I was 22 when I met him, and in the worse crisis of my life yet (until he gave me one worse). He was 35, had been in our program for eight months, and in another twelve step group for two years. I asked him for help. He used his position of power to exploit my presence. It began with holding me hostage to emotional dumps. Crossing boundaries, testing limits, increasing inappropriateness. Secluding us into our own little two-person solitude where lines began to blur, the way anything makes sense as long as it stays in your head.

Desperately, I begged him to keep things clean. I pleaded, over and over, to empty promises I’d receive back, that he’d stop sexualising me. He wrote me fanfiction. With multiple chapters. I’ve saved some of it, including one about flying to Vienna to have sex with me. When I tried to tell him how suicidal it was making me, he’d just make jokes about fucking my corpse.

(Oh my god. I just remembered. For a while, he was convinced if we had sex it would get the tension out of the way and we’d be able to get back to business. Talk about coercion…)

He ran over every single line I tried to draw in the sand. I was a meagrely built sandcastle digging moats and he was a tsunami flooding every one until I was drowning in him.

But I could not admit the reality of what had happened to me once again, so I broke. I became okay with it. I leaned into it. My mind bent in a way where my entire interiority revolved around him. I scooped out and dumped all of who I was, and filled myself up with his emotions, his loneliness, his grief. For months, I’d lie in bed for hours after I awoke, only able to get up once we called. He ruled my life, he ruled me.

I became the madonna-whore of his complex dreams. Intelligent, charming, funny, smart, attractive, young, and all his. Never would I have gone for him, had he not broken me down. That’s why I chose him: he was safe, on my end. I just saw him as an older man. And, before him, I was never into older folks. Since him, though, I still carry the twists he left in my mind. An age difference, to me, now, does not mean safe, it means sexual. I eroticised what used to be abject to me, and I can’t seem to reclaim my old position.

(Another memory: I was still recovering from the trauma of my abortion. Really, the trauma lay in the pregnancy. The existential body horror that ripped my life out of my hands. He knew this. Yet, he had a kink for pregnancy. And, would, well, fantasise… openly, to me.)

It’s been a year, now since he blocked me and I decided to fly to his house. To make him deal with the consequences of his actions. Sobbing in the bathroom, holding my phone, I confessed to my friends that their love could not touch me. I knew that they loved me, but I could not feel it. They were so far from my range of perception that I genuinely did not think anyone would notice if I fucking went missing. That I could just leave the country and die without making a ripple in reality.

I spent a week living in his house. While my loved ones worked each other up into a panic because I was acting erratically and had just disappeared, I was watching Netflix on his couch, walking his dog, and eating horrible British food. The sickest part is that that wasn’t even the first time I’d been to his house.

A month earlier, in February, I’d gone to visit him (because he couldn’t leave the country without informing the government) (also, for all the pedestals he placed me on, I never seemed to be worth much of his effort). We had sex. Obviously. But only after he’d read several pages of answers I’d written about how it had impacted me. On my last night there, against my request to try getting enough rest, he convinced me to have sex, which I fell asleep during. That didn’t stop him from continuing nevertheless.

The full extent of everything, of how fucked up this thing that fucked me up was is hard for me to face head on. In that way, I’m quite similar to my character Sam, who is writing a memoir of his own, about his experience with someone older taking advantage of him, as a way of healing and reclaiming his own story. In that way, I guess, to my surprise, I’m echoing him. Writing my own story, despite usually preferring to hide behind fiction, in hopes doing so will allow me to leave it behind. Leave him behind. Name all the things he did so I can pack it up and stop yearning for his damage.

To close, I quote a text I had to read for class recently:

<< Years later when I confessed with deep shame to a feminist mentor that I had done something so utterly cliché as having an affair with a male professor, she replied: “But of course it’s cliché! It’s cliché because it is continuously reproduced! You are part of a reproduction machine!” It is a story that is “to be had everywhere,” the gendered power dynamics of intellectual mentorship. I was fully aware and critical of these dynamics, and fully reproduced them while imagining myself as unique. >> 1

I never wanted something like this in my biography. I have a tendency, in my dissociative habit, to simply delete truths I don’t want to accept. I want to be master of my own fate, I don’t wallow in things that happen to me; I simply decide they didn’t.

But it did happen. It will forever be part of my story, part of me. Unwillingly and unglamorously, this, too, is who I am.

Poem: 12 hours sobriety

to be faced with facetious fortune at your fingertips
heaven honey-dewed drool dripping from a sweaty stomach
stuck with slick sick destiny, desire
taken for it
and to choose, instead, abstinence
with white smog coating your gums and
cough drop company clogging lungs
wheezing, screaming, agony
to choose the pain of heaven over
the ecstasy of hell

gonna gouge my eyes out to the strumming of his song
stuck in ancient ruin recordings
fossilising his voice, the intonations, tones,
hopes and his projections on me,
kept tight in time capsules I collected
to pour over with a bitter
staring at his profile as if
I could pull my heart out of my chest
and crawl with it back in time to when
he was just a safe sponsor to be trusted
someone that promised love and guidance
someone I believed in

to have the contact details of a man
with scary secrets but equipped
with drug and dick, disturbing as it may be

strapping myself in a straight jacket
slicing where our skin has stuck together

i miss the bliss of shared delusion
choosing to live in an illusion
long enough to form a bond
with the father figure I am fucking

he stole the time I would have
shared with me
and I’m alone at home with a stranger
who fogged up and clogged up and covered up her feelings with his

repeating the reminders of reason into her reflection in the mirror, staring
that a night spent scraping barely by
the last string of her sanity
is lighter to survive than another sin
added to her debt to god

Hi Moa,

I want to make amends for what happened between us when I was your sponsor, for breaking your trust and for not maintaining the boundaries that were necessary to protect both of us from our addictions. My lack of clear boundaries allowed the dynamic to shift in unhealthy ways causing harm, which I regret deeply.

I am taking responsibility for the ways my behaviour contributed to confusion, betrayal, and distress for you. You don’t owe me a response or forgiveness, but I want to own my part with clarity and respect.

I also want to acknowledge how this affected your recovery. You asked me to be your sponsor, seeking support, structure, and safety, and my actions disrupted that. I really did want to help you in your journey but allowed things to get out of hand. I am sorry for the distress, confusion, and emotional pain this has caused you.

When things escalated, I tried to repair the situation by going no contact. Although I was trying to prevent further harm, I can now see how that choice left you feeling abandoned and added to your hurt. I’m sorry for the impact that had on you.

You were sincere in your recovery journey, and you deserved consistency, clarity, and healthy guidance. I did not uphold that standard, and I take responsibility for my part in that.

I also want to acknowledge the strength and commitment you’ve shown in your recovery. You’ve worked incredibly hard, and I genuinely admire the progress you’ve made and the dedication you bring to healing.

My amends going forward are about living differently, showing up in the fellowship as a healthy peer, honouring boundaries, being responsible for my recovery, and ensuring that any interaction we have is safe, respectful, and firmly grounded in sobriety. I want our connection to be healthy, appropriate, and supportive of both our recoveries.

I wish you strength, clarity, and continued growth on your path.

Regards,

Greg

I think I have a lot more processing and letting go to do with this. I suspect so, based on how often I relapse and reach out to him in need of his attention. This, posting all this, feels resonant to when I let go of my rape trauma that I’d carried for five years by letting 16 year old me scream about it in detail in an instagram post. It’s about showing that version of myself that I am not ashamed of her, and that I love her, and that I’ll proudly tell her story too, as my own. Based on this post’s reception and my personal need to scream, I might talk more about it. But I’m ready to move the fuck on from this man.

This mother fucker stole the last of my early twenties from me.

And no. My novella, about a woman who turns 23 then has a breakdown where she ditches her life for a week to fuck a 35 year British man while her friends grow increasingly concerned, is not, oddly enough, autofiction or based on my breakdown at all. I wrote it when I was 21. I’m just attuned to the universe enough that my predictive intuition is practically psychic, and my writing is often prophetic.

Poem: Hi Greg

Hi Greg,
can you hear me?
I’m the ghost of your relapse,
live, in flesh and blood,
standing in the hollow space between yours ears,
banging against the walls of your thick skull.

I’m the monkey on your back.
I’m the consequences you regret.
I’m the evil shade of ultravox,
singing: Vienna meant everything to you.

It takes two to dance our degeneracy
and I won’t let you go sober.

I’m the two litre bottle of vodka
that’s grown emotions of her own.
I’m crawling into the cavity in your chest
and I. fit. perfectly.

You can’t resist me. Not really. Not truly. ;
I am the desire over which you hold no power.
God won’t help you here.

I’m young, hot, and out of reach for a creep like you
— former family man, growing greyer, almost forty —
unless caught up in the two-person tango
you choreographed, remember?

how I used to beg for you?
in my waking moments and my sleep?
I’m the little sister who used to call you “daddy”.

Don’t date someone older, now,
like I’m something you could leave behind.

You claim that it’s over, but
you smile, bashful, at my attention,

and I see it, I see my in,
I see you begging “please, break me again”.

Don’t you worry, Greg.
I’m coming to get you.
I won’t let you leave me lonely.

I am the termites, crawling through your bones, gnawing away at you,
making you weak. I am the spiders crawling through your veins.

Do you feel me? My hand, next to yours, almost touching.
Hovering. Close.

I’m Vienna,
waiting,
for you.