healing from emotional abuse: two love poems

CW: Emotional, Verbal, and Spiritual Abuse

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By Sara Onitskua
​AFO Content Writer

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CW: Emotional, Verbal, and Spiritual Abuse

two love poems

          I.
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it is 2017 and i am naive and i ask them what is love. they define it as growing together, evolving together, and i like that definition at first.
i have a lot of growing to do. i imagine growing with someone else. how beautiful, how right. i bring down my walls and gather my hope in the palm of my hand and hold it out to them, exposed and willing.

they take it and run and i am swept up. love is intense, exhausting, a whirlwind. i am holding on and waiting for the calm that never comes.

it is not the love i imagined. they say in order to grow i must change who i am. something is wrong with me. i must be fixed, and i can be, they will teach me, they will save me. for they know about love. their divine purpose was to be sent to earth to teach it to love, so i am told. they will start with me.

a few months later.
love is:
a windowless room; sterile and cold.
it is captivity - i can’t leave.
it is punishment.
every night they yell and call me names as i fall asleep and it's the last thing i hear and the first thing i see in my dreams.

love is jealousy. it’s possessive. love burns but it’s for my own good. i am bad at love. i do not know how to love. i am doing it wrong, all wrong.
how wrong must i be to be a fuck-up at love.

love is empty.
the sex feels bad and the love feels worse.

isn't love supposed to feel good?
please tell me
i am worth more than this.


          II.

it is 2027 and i am grown but still soft and i do not ask you what is love, because i already know. it has been years of searching and growing and searching and growing. i have since found love in many places, but not so much in lovers.

we're at an art museum on a date. face a peculiar painted box with only a name and an artist. we puzzle over its meaning and i think back and remind myself.

i know everything i need to know about love
to make it real this time.

because remember bell hooks says love is:
an action; a verb as opposed to a noun.
it is a choice; not something you fall into.
most of all, it is never abuse.

love is most easily defined by what it’s not. easily made a cliche.
but it is far more than any single action.
love is a force.
powerful, revolutionary, and all around.

and isn’t it beautiful how no one love looks exactly the same?

love takes on many forms.
like snowflakes, catch one on your tongue and feel warmth.
it melts and tastes like laughter and safety and tenderness. never forcing, never hurting.
still a little mysterious and unexplainable but the most natural feeling.

i carry the love i have planted
and grown
and nurtured
and lived.

and here i am smiling. it has been a long time coming but i am ready to start again.

i bring down my walls and gather my hope in the palm of my hand and i hold it out to you, exposed and willing. knowing it is in good hands. i trust you but most importantly
i trust myself.


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The first poem was painful to write. It required many breaks to decompress, many realizations that I’m probably not as healed as I want to be. And I still hesitate to put this out into the world. I’m scared of where it might end up, and I’m scared of giving too much away.

Once the second poem started coming together, I felt those worries lessen a bit. 2027 was kind of an arbitrary number, and I don't necessarily believe it will take ten years for me to be ready to put myself out there again. It’s so far been a year and a half, though, and I haven’t gone on a date or done anything, really, because I keep wondering how I’m going to prevent a similar situation from happening again. I haven’t shaken that fear yet, so the second poem is me imagining how I want to eventually be. Imagining a world and a time when I’ll be ready, knowing that even if it’s not right now, it will be someday.