TRAGIC Poem: When They Look Away, by Gabriella Niles-Ewen

They say,
I should have been stronger —
like bones aren’t meant to break
under the weight of a stranger’s hands.

Like I wasn’t already fighting to hold on
while he took pieces of me,
one by one,
until the mirror became a place
I could no longer stand to look.

They say,
you’re slipping now,
falling too far —
as if I chose this hollowing,
as if my hunger for escape
was some kind of betrayal
to a world that stood still
while he did what he did.

But my body remembers
in ways they refuse to see—
the way control slips through your fingers
when your worth is rewritten
by someone else’s violence,
when food feels like the only thing
you can refuse.

And still, they turn their backs,
turn my story into questions
about what I didn’t do,
as if survival has rules
I should have known.

They never ask about the nights
spent unravelling in silence,
about the ways I fought
to keep breathing when breathing
was the hardest thing to do.

Instead, they blame the fall,
the aftermath, the ways I cope—
ignore the wreckage
that still lingers in the corners,
pretend they didn’t hear
the sound of me breaking
the moment he entered the room.