{ is this the beginning or the end? }

she said, take me back.

or was that you?

------------------------

i've been having a lot of conversations with myself lately. for awhile i squirreled things away, flung them out of whatever clearing i'd made, because there wasn't any more room for things that hurt. well, those things have crept back to my now-less-destructed area. they've been tentatively pressing against the edges of the space i've held for about a year now. each day they grow braver. a couple have begun to roam freely inside the border. they wail softly, mostly at night, drawing out those memories and that grief.

------------------------

you have broken me for the last time, i said. 

i have let you break me for the last time.

that's what i'm beginning to understand: i will hold him at a distance forever, because of what he's done. he trammeled over me again and again, and at some level he was aware of what he was doing. (how many times is someone allowed to say, in retrospect i didn't handle that very well?) but i'm also irreversibly angry with myself. because i let myself stay in his path again and again. being hurt by him became the way i could stay connected to him. i was afraid if i pulled out the thing that kept piercing me, it would leave a gaping wound that would never close; i would bleed to death. and wasn't pain better than death?

oh, the things we tell ourselves.

------------------------

when you pull out an object that's gone through and through, the space left behind screams and gushes. but the object itself is unaffected. no, worse: not unaffected, but free. this is the thing that hurts the most: if you can somehow find the strength to remove the offending object (which i did), you're left with a searing, different kind of pain (which i am). the object made a hole in you, changing your entire topography, while having to change nothing about itself. and when it leaves you, you are left with its void, while it continues to retain its original shape and composition. it's fucking infuriating, because when two things come together in such a way, shouldn't both be permanently altered?

------------------------

i am left without the pain and rusted edges of you piercing me. but i am also left without you. it's a logical chain of events whose sharpness is not muted by its inevitability. sometimes i find myself longing for the other pain, the old kind, the duller ache of you in me, how it had always been and how it would always be. i'd found a way to live with that fever. had i known all i was striving for (freedom from you) would feel this way, i'm not sure i would've kept pursuing it. i guess that's why the places we yearn to reach are never quite as we expected them to be, whether better or worse --- if we were capable of knowing precisely how things would be without having to struggle through pain and time to see for ourselves, we'd have no reason to fight so hard to reach them. and if we knew getting better could burn like this, we'd stay sick and infected our entire lives.

--------------------------

i am seeking

i am striving

i am in it

with all my heart.

{ van gogh }