Steel Sharpens Steel by Charlotte Marie (graded readers .txt) 📕

I have always wanted to be loud, and I have always wanted to be violent. I have this image of myself as hard steel. Instead, I am soft like cashmere. My steel armor I wear with pride in my mind’s eye is really a robe of silk.

Instead of the heroine with a bloody blade, I have only ever been a weeping survivor.

There is no glory in sleeping in my car. No one envys me on the nights I fall into bed with a stranger to pay for my next meal. There was no pride in pulling myself from the arms of my temporary lover and going out again, stuffing a wad of tens in my bra.

I’ve never been in love. But I fake it. Here is my love: A car rolls up, and I get into it.

Today my skin is soft. In the brief moments I rent in truck stop bathroom, I scrub and scrub and scrub at my skin till it glows pink. I’ve been trying to get on with living. I’ve been making peace with myself in small spots when I can find it. There’s a punchline in there, I guess. I heard it once I think, something about how living a life with less is a life better lived. It isn’t as glamorous as that, not when I’ve had to scrape together scraps. Nothing to write home about when I’ve been pretending I’m comfortable with nothingness. It’s okay. I’ve no one to write to in a long while.

I’ve decided to splurge on a hotel room for the night. The walls are thin, and the paint is chipping, but at least it’s a room with a locking door. Not like any lock could stop the very determined.

I’ve been making my way back home for last week, crisscrossing across the United States to get back to upstate New York. I think it might be the call of the damned leading me to my doom.

You go away, and you return a different person - but you never come back all the way. Some part of you was left on the blacktop that crisscrosses the barren land between mile 67 and 198. The blinding white of distant headlights has carved away pieces of you that you only wish you could get back.

I haven’t been back for six years. Foster Fathers that leer at you every time you come in a room and rooms with doors that don’t lock tend to be excellent motivators to disappear.

I thought when I left the home of my childhood - my own little house of horrors - the nightmares would stay there too. But my memories had buried themselves in my bones. Knit themselves into my skin. It’s hard to reconcile the memories of a terrified ten-year-old kid with the mind of an adult. It wasn’t a monster that killed my family. Monsters are only real when they are men.

The bed is hard, the coils of the mattress dig into the space between my should blades. It’s a while before I drift off to the sounds of the cars of the highway. I dream of a little girl in a white dress next to a tombstone, fog wrapping around her ankles.

She is screaming.

Publication Date: 02-10-2020

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