It’s been eight years.

Eight years since I saw you.

Eight years since you touched me in ways I didn’t want you to.

Eight years is a long time. And no time at all.

For you, I’m sure I was a blip in your radar, but for me, it has taken me this long to finally feel safe. And that’s on a good day.

I was a blip in your radar, but you were a wound that is becoming a scar that will never go away.

It will take me a lifetime to forget you because my body remembers you every day.

When we met, I already had a lifetime of trauma yet to be remembered. Yours was the trauma inflicted on my body that awoke something in me–a reminder that my body had never been my own.

For the first few years after I encountered you, I wished I didn’t even have a body.

If my body didn’t exist, maybe it wouldn’t remember the pain that it is to be invaded like a country with borders that have been colonized by yet another white man with an agenda.

You viewed me as something to be conquered.

And it was a lie.

I am not something to be conquered. I am Someone. Someone who deserves to be loved. Someone with a body that is now my own.

So, every year when the trauma washes on the shore of my body, I remind myself now–this land that is my body is mine to maintain and mine to love.

I am someone deserving of love.

You were a hurricane that left me shipwrecked at sea.

Today. Today I am an island surrounded by an ocean of love.

There are no more storms that can wash that away.

My body is an island of love.