Washing Off Old Graffiti

They have carved the letters of their names into my bones three thousand times over,

Their lips and tongues have bent my name like soft metal.

There are summer clothes forming creases and dust in the back of my closet and I will not put them on even when the seasons change, because they smell like people who are no longer home to me.

Sometimes the back of my throat still tastes like the words they whispered into my parted lips,

When my mother hugs me I stiffen, wondering if she knows how much she does not know, hoping she does not see the places where innocence has been excavated from layers within my skeleton.

I wonder if my skin recalls the sets of fingers that have wandered its valleys before,

If it resents those who thought they owned it. If my scars could speak, whose name would they curse? 

On bad days I attempt to climb out from the inside of a body I am sure exists to betray me, a skin that whispers stories of those I have tried to scorch from the surface of my mind.

On good days I wash the tangles of regret from my hair, steam clouding the glass shower door, and on it I write each letter of my name. Remembering, for once, who truly owns it.

The past leaves old graffiti stains from days long gone, but my heart is neither brick walls nor carving wood, and while its surfaces are saturated in ink, those words are love poems I have written myself. 

Mementos reminding me that old lovers do not own our bodies, only our scattered memories.