There is a symbolism in the fires we set; in the bridges we burn with intention, to the ground. We stand there, staring blankly at the rubble and debris. We take comfort in the fact, that we’re on the other side of it alone; that no one can harm us now. When the one person you trust most with your life is the one who slowly took it away day by day mark by mark it puts us on guard and every time we let someone get close enough, to feel the warmth of our light, it feels like all they want to do, is snuff it out. They don’t know what to do with our hurricane souls, so they try everything in their power, to water us down; to dismiss or to minimize our pain; to silence our thoughts somehow. Relationships always leave us feeling caged. We feel bent, and broken; we feel wounded and sometimes even afraid. And no matter how many times we try to explain it to them, this sadness inside us, still remains. We are left there in silence; the aftermath of such violence. We are left there all alone, to handle our rage. A pain born of fire; the object of horrific unwanted desire. A fierceness born, from forcibly living, inside of a cage. We didn’t ask for this to be our story. We’ve done everything in our power, to rewrite our history. But you cannot change the past; you can only change the future. And happiness just cant last, when your wounds are never sutured. They want us to heal, without feeling a thing; without hearing the story of what shattered our souls. They tell us it’s over now; that it’s all just in the past. They say to get over it; to move on with our lives; as if freedom is something we could ever truly grasp. We can barely breathe, most days of our life. We are fighting these demons, that the monsters left inside. They handed us their darkness, and we’re supposed to just instinctively know, how to turn it back into light. They murdered our soul; they shattered our innocence, and most of the world around us, doesn’t want us to put up a fight. They want us to be quiet. They want us to simmer down. They want us to handle this massacre inside us, without making a single sound; without speaking the depth of our pain, out loud. So you see, there is intention, in these bridges we burn down. We don’t just set them on fire with a match; we incinerate them, to the ground. We make sure that when we burn them, they can never be rebuilt; that we will never be able to cross them again. We keep ourselves safe. In our cage, we remain. It’s exactly where they wanted us, in the end. In our hollowed out shell, we are deathly silent. We are violently deconstructed. We keep burning these bridges to symbolically show, that our lives can only be reconstructed.in our own time and it takes years not weeks or months... We cannot heal, what we do not acknowledge; and they will not acknowledge our pain. So we stand here alone, on the other side of burning bridges, with the smell of burning ash, in our veins. We mutilate and burn our own flesh, in the flames. This is what abuse and mental and physical trauma does, to a domestic abuse survivor. This is the destruction, that it leaves in its wake. We are chaos, born of hellfire. We are the very definition, of debilitating pain. A pain that cant be seen by others only felt within ourselves.. And as long as no one allows us to speak our holy truth, we’ll be trapped all alone here, in our shame. And in the end, we’ll have nothing left to show for ourselves, but this burning flesh, and a cage.”