It’s incredible, the things we don’t allow ourselves to feel. Walking through the world shrouded in bubble wrap. A cozy, cushioned barrier constructed on self spun narratives, resentment and the soiled blood of deep, gushing cuts. Propelled forward by the nervous energy of a mortally wounded heart. We run so far on broken bones and don’t realize how bad we let it get until we’ve splintered into pieces.

It took a long, long time to realize how much it hurt. To feel a warm gust through the breezeway that formed in the middle of me. My mother always told me that if you think a person is lying, you let them talk until they unwind their own fibs. Maybe that’s true of ourselves too. Maybe if we let ourselves talk enough, we begin to dismantle the temples we built around the feelings we don’t want to face. Ultimately, it seems, if you shout for long enough into a void, what gets echoed back to you is the truth. Eventually you just get tired of trying to hold yourself together with the things you told yourself to make sense of it all. 

There have been so many times in life when I’d felt relentlessly angry. Stuck in a loop of all the things that boiled my blood and all the ways I’d boil theirs right back. A b-roll narration in the back of my mind of all the unkind things I could think. A tiring, harrowing endless monologue of grief, expelled out sideways. I always thought they were tired of hearing about it all. But it was me, I was tired, every time. 

It makes sense now. Because I’m in a place of contentment, and I’m tired. Tired of thinking about all the other things that I could possibly find displeasing. Because it all boils down to one thing that is simply not right. A piece that was once there lost to time. There was a gaping, endless, burning void inside that I didn’t realize was tearing open wider everyday.

I thought I’d made my peace. Come to the understanding that this was just what was happening now, felt secure in the knowledge that it wouldn’t be long now until the world would even back out. But what I didn’t account for was that what I was leaving behind wasn’t just a patch on my life, it was interwoven in the threads of it. It made up so much of the fabric of who I am that it had become an integral part of my being. So this wasn’t like having a hole in the knee of his jeans. This was unwinding, unraveling, unbecoming of the person I had been. It was easy to ignore the fraying at first, but with each passing day that strayed from the binary star system, that person fell apart all together.