the girl in the mirror

I reach out, my fingertips brushing against the glass. I see a girl every time I look in a mirror, she's standing there on the other side but she's no longer the same as she used to be.  The light hits the glass and bounces back a stranger with my eyes and a mouth that forgot how to curve upward. She doesn’t flinch. She only stares back with that devastating, silent accusation—the look of someone who fought a war and lost every single inch of ground.

My skin feels like an ill-fitting shroud, heavy with the weight of memories I tried to scream it away. I remember the air turning thick and the world shrinking down to the sound of my own heartbeat, frantic and trapped. I told people no so many times, I whispered it until my throat was raw and shouted it until the walls shook, but their hands still roamed over my body as if I were nothing more than a map they were entitled to redraw. They took the "no" and folded it into a space they could ignore, leaving me to piece together a self that no longer fits the frame. 

Now, the girl in the mirror is the only one who knows the truth of that silence—that I am still standing there, somewhere underneath the touch of the man who refused to listen. She is the witness I can't look away from, the only part of me that stayed behind in the room when the rest of me ran. 

I look at the broken girl in the mirror, and she looks back at me.

(idk if this is considered poetry but whatever)