Once upon a time there were no street lights. Once, you would go to sleep and dream by the light of the moon. Once, there were no airplanes to mistake for shooting stars.

There are no shooting stars anymore. There is no moonlight.

Teddy sat at my desk, picking through my poetry like a mother chimpanzee cleans her young, fishing out the parasites and flicking them away. The once white lined sheet laid limp in his hand, drenched in my poem's blood, red ink spilling through my words.

I watched him in the window, whispering to his reflection. You will never break me.

I wanted him to break me. I wanted to be broken, to have something concrete to fix. More than George Orwell prodding my critical thoughts, more than Mr. Poe lurking in my dark corners. They were my ghosts. They would ruin me, but to whom could I prove them? The only option was to become one of them.

The crinkling of paper deafened me. His grunt of frustration shattered me.

"What was that?" Teddy growled. My poem laid crumpled in a ball beside the trashcan, like a corpse thrown through the windshield in fetal position. Dear, you braced yourself, but it wasn't enough.

I touched his sharp cheekbone in the window. "A poem."

"You can do better."

"I can do better."

I liked being broken. Teddy was the only one who knew how to do it right.

He stepped over my poem's broken body, kicking it aside. I watched like an abused child seeing her father burned at the stake. You are dead to me, I told it. You were already dead to me.

Teddy's fingers flickered across the back of my neck, a candle's flames across a puddle of kerosene. I leaned into his touch, wishing for the knives that were his hands. You will never break me.

But I was already broken. Like a china doll lying in pieces on the linoleum floor of the hospital, my only desire was to be swept up and repurposed. I am not a poet. I am not your doll to drop on the floor.

I have always been a poet. I will always be a doll to be broken

Teddy's hands caressed my stomach from behind, igniting their fire in my stomach. I pouted at the window, sour faced as a child refusing to eat her dinner. Teddy was my patient parent, waiting for me to grow hungry.

Jane Austen shook her head. Margaret Mitchell threw me into his arms.

He felt like darkness. The darkness of laying face down on the desk, waiting to be mended. His fingers were those of a man wielding glue, placing the broken pieces together again with care.

When he was done he would pick me up and give me back to the child who had dropped me, expecting thanks.

My poems would never thank him. They spat, they cursed, they jeered. They never thanked.