A Disturbing Experience

I sit in fear.

The ache within me spreading like cancer.

My world is not turning,

it's too scared to.

I see the words scrawled 

on me like the disease I wear.

In naming my disease, he named me.

And I believed him.

Where does my strength come from

when I force myself to face this?

To accept it like a case of chicken-pox,

though it will never go away.

Acceptance makes the pain lessen like the grip of a headache.

I smile and play and tear my new birthday dress on the slide.

But as I sit alone on a teeter-totter my disease flares

and I sink into it like a coma.

I cannot face it, or bare it, or accept it, or even scream out for help.

I'm cast in fear and I wear silence like a surgeon's mask to protect myself,

and my family too.

They don't know about my disease, and I can't risk telling them.

Behind my mask I play.

I hold my mother's dog up to the window when my mother isn't home.

I wait for the little dog to whine and shake as she searches the yard below for my mother.

Then I hold her tight and whisper soothingly in her tiny soft ear.

The pounding of her heart against my hand

slows down, mine does too

And we both stop trembling in my embrace.

We're like victims of a house fire clinging to each other on the ledge of a window.

My tormenter is not my disease.

He is the one who named it, named me,

When he misdiagnosed my freckles as cooties

And I was slain by a six year old.