To All the Men I Loved Before

You have hurt me in ways I could never have foreseen. It's amazing how I have my father and both grandfathers and several uncles, yet every man I am with has to live in your shadow. Every guy is going to be abusive or cheat or just be a tool, and now I am forever paranoid and torturing men with endless tests to ensure they aren't you. Even though all of you have left at some point in time, you have left scars on me that only come out whenever I am most vulnerable. I'm suffocating men in scar tissue while you continue to go around making more. Killing more little girls' views of me. And I would just like you all to know that I hope you are at least getting better.

I used to hate you when I was small, and now I understand you. I have created a few of you, men who like someone than got shat on and turned cold. I decided to stop after awhile, in some drunken attempt to not make more men cry, and a part of me hopes you have found someone to nurture you instead of hurt you. Someone who tries to finally cast your hurt so that it heals. But a larger part of me doesn't care what you do. A larger fraction of me remembers you well, remembers how you treated the women in my life and how they hurt over you, and that fraction reminds me that everything I do to protect myself is warranted. One misstep and one of you will be in my bed, and I realized when I was small that I cannot have that.