She Was Slowly Erased

I look at old photos—and I don’t see what I used to see.

I don’t pick apart my weight or my smile or my hair.
I don’t zoom in and cringe at my hips or the way my clothes fit.
Instead, I feel this ache deep in my chest for the girl in them.

Because I know what’s coming.

She doesn’t.

She’s just standing there, hopeful. Loving hard. Wanting to be chosen, kept, enough.

But soon she’ll be convinced that she’s not.

Before she got engaged, she wore a ball chain necklace every day. She’d had it for years. It wasn’t fancy. Just simple. It had a Celtic cross on it, and she never took it off. She also adorned almost every finger with rings—little tokens of self-expression. Nothing loud, nothing wild. Just her vibe.

But once he put a ring on her finger, he made her take all of them off.

The necklace? Gone.
The rings? Too many. “You don’t need those anymore.”

He said it was symbolic. That she was “his” now. That his ring was the only one that mattered.

And at the time? She let it happen.
Because she thought maybe that’s what love was. Sacrificing. Submitting. Proving.

But it wasn’t love.
It was control.
It was the beginning of the slow erasing of everything she was.

I want to go back to the girl in these photos and whisper:
“You are not too much. You are not too fat. You are not hard to love.”

And you are not property.

I want to go back in time and tell her that the cute boy from photography class—the one who took advantage of her while she was drunk, even though she said no, and then convinced her it was what she wanted—wouldn’t magically become safe just because he gave her a ring. What he did to her was never love. That kind of betrayal could never be love.

I want to tell her that love doesn’t require shrinking. That real love never makes you question your body, your story, your intuition, or your sparkle.

I want to tell her that it wasn’t her fault.
I want to scream at her that she wasn’t fat.
That her worth wasn’t tied to what he thought was “hot enough” to keep his eyes from wandering.
That men who cheat do so because of what’s lacking in them—not in the women who love them.

Looking at her now, I don’t see flaws.
I see softness. Brightness. Fire. Style. Strength. A girl trying to belong to herself in a world that keeps telling her she should belong to someone else.

And I want to be the one who finally tells her:

“You don’t need to change to be loved.
You don’t need to be smaller, quieter, skinnier, simpler, obedient.
You don’t have to change who you are.
You are enough.
Just as you are.
You just need to be you.”

So to the girl in these photos:
You didn’t lose yourself.
You were stolen.
Piece by piece, who you were was chipped away—until even you questioned who you were.
The vibrant, beautiful, full-of-fire version of who you were got buried beneath a very small man’s insecurities and his desperate need for control.

But I see her now.
I found her — under the lies, the shame, the silence.
And this time, I’m never letting her go.

You’re not his anymore.
You’re not anyone’s.
You belong to you.
And you are finally free.