I will never be the same

As a teen girl
I was very out spoken
I even got it for most out spoken my senior year
I was the type of girl who never let anyone push her around
I never understood all my crazy friends with there jealous boyfriends
and how if they left them they would go crawling back
No man put me down or made me feel little of myself
I was on strong ground

I never realized that as i entered woman hood
I would let the world i made for myself crumble to the ground
That one man could break me down,
and make me look in the mirror and no longer know myself
That one man could twist me and bend me and make me be his perfect girl,
but still have me never be good enough!
That one man could control me and have me doing only
what he wanted and what he said
That the man who claimed he loved me, would beat me, cheat on, and threaten to kill me and everyone and thing I cared about in this world!
Yet in the end he would hold me in his arms and tell me I was his world

When I met him he was prince charming
No man could have been as sweet
And the love he had for me was never ending
I was his everything

But soon I became his nothing
He started cheating on me early on
Then the mental abuse came along
I left many times but always came back
Then slowly the pushing began
after that there was the first time he hit me
and after that first hit
he never stopped
I walked around on egg shells
afraid of what I would say
I'm not some one to just stand there and not speak my mind
but he made sure I became that girl
cause if not I would pay
I would spend hours crying
curled up in a ball
not wanting to be near him
but I knew I had to be

I had no friends and the friends who I did have I would soon lose
He never wanted me to speak to my family
and each time I did it was a another lie
"no mom I'm fine, yes everything is great, no hes not hitting me, no I'm not lieing, there is nothing wrong, he loves me, I wish you would just understand, yes I know you cant take this, please don't cry, I'm fine!"
Lie after lie after lie I would tell her
She no longer knew who I was

Once I had to be removed by the cops
he would  not let me leave
I left but then went back
it only got worse after that

Each time I left he would beg me to come back
make me millions of promises and say he would never hurt me
that he knew he needed help and he would go get it
but he never did and after a few weeks to a month
it would start all over again only getting worse each time

He did many of things to me
He once smashed a speaker box over my head
you think I would have learned but I never did
He would choke me
punch me
hit me
throw me into walls
Push me onto the floor and kick me
hit me with all kinds of things
throw things at me
but each time when it was over he would hold me in his arms and say
baby girl I love you and I'm sorry just don't make me mad

It would get so bad that I would sometimes
think of ways to kill him in his sleep
All I needed to do was kill him then i could be free

His touch made me sick
When he looked at me wanted to die
When we had sex i cried each time

I would grab a knife and try to cut myself
he would take it from me
so after that started when the beating began
I would back my self in to a corner
and take my finger nails and dig them into the inside of my arm
from my wrists the whole way to my elbow as hard as I could
till my whole arm was covered in blood
then he would stop
That was the only way I could get him to stop
many of times I thought he was going to kill me

This all went on for 2 long years
and you may ask why he did all this
and I don't know
the truth is he never drank did drugs or any of that
so like so many other men who blame it on that
he did not have that excuse

The reason I stayed you may ask
Well that was because of his 2 little boys
who I raised and were just like me own
I loved them more then life itself
its the only thing that kept me
from killing myself

When I did leave
leaving them was the hardest thing
I ever did
but if I never left
I don't believe I would be alive here today

I'm happy to say that
that man is now in prison
and he will be for a long time
seems like his new girl friend was not like me
and she made him pay for the way he is

I have moved on in life
and I am now married
to my childhood sweetheart
life is still hard dealing with my past
its been just over a year now
and little by little
I'm picking up the pieces of me
and putting myself back together
but I know after what I have been through
I will never be the same