Foreward
It is not often I write from the heart. I prefer to hide my feelings. Many of these things I had not even admitted to myself until I wrote them out. After writing this, I mostly feel this sense of suspension. I feel like I am halted mid-jump and my stomach is permanently flipping over and over. I am so, so weary of pretending to heal, so I would like to state, for the sake of my sanity, that I haven't made it to the end, my journey has just begun and the road goes ever on and on... I'm not even sure if what I wrote makes any sense. But, for once, I meant it.
the melody
“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep... that have taken hold.”
I don't like to look back to last year. The image of it is nightmarish, smokish, dark, and dripping with despair. And me- I am unrecognizable. An emaciated, hollowed puppet who wears a thick wooden mask with a carefully carved insane smile stretching from ear to ear. She sits, barely breathing, glassy-eyed and so close to spiritual death, and she stares at nothing. No past. No present. No future.
For so long, I ran and refused to accept that my heart had been ripped from my chest, wrung of all its crimson contents, and been trampled, left to shrivel and decay. I wanted so badly, so desperately to be happy, to be perfect, to be peaceful. I would have torn my own teeth from my skull if it meant I could have any one of those things. Happiness. Peace. Perfection. The hunger for them defined my every quaking step and those steps became a looping dance, a wild fight for control. I could not control the direction of my life, or the actions of the wolves around me, so I controlled my thoughts, my hunger, my dreams, my voice, my laugh, myself.
I turned my skin inside out and folded it in on itself like an old rag, desperately trying to find new fabric, something I had missed, something I could make a person out of. Tearing the fleshy folds up and up until the shreds were indeterminate between monster or woman. All natural thought was replaced with repetitive formulated phrases. All simple imperfection was hunted down and removed, burned, torn off, covered up to match those around me.
And once the storm of soul mutilation had settled, there was loneliness. Such acute loneliness. As if a stake made from ice was being driven down through my heart into the pit of my stomach. My mind was not a cave, but a black hole sucking in every thought and whispering it back to me. God's voice became a subdued and distant call. The soft beat of a butterfly's wing in a mess of screaming wind. Was it even there? Was I even there?
Love. Peace. Prosperity. Faith. Health. They were myths to me. Legends. Lies told by the fortunate and thrown to the downtrodden like muddied leftovers thrown to a dog. I refused to lap them up. I did not trust them. And I began to say to myself and to God, every night as I lay in the darkness, that if this was life, I did not want to live it. I told him, again and again, each night with more fervor, and during the day, I daydreamed of ceasing to exist in human form, imagining myself as a tree, or a bird, or the wind, something without pain or regret or sorrow. But still, I awoke to find myself trapped in the fleshy cage, with the horrible prospect of the day to come, and an acute memory of the days, and days, and days before it.
The sun only began to rise and gently, softly warm the tips of my hair, my fingers, my ruined soul, when I uprooted myself from the pit where I lay.
Like tearing a rotted, tarnished tree from the ground, it took strength, and bits of me, memories, traits, dreams, were left, still cacked with mud and clinging to the floor of the pit. The wormy walls and vermin-infested dirt told me that I had hit deeper than rock bottom. Leaving the hellish hole was unfathomable. If circumstance had not forced me to claw from the rotten and watery pit, I wonder, even now,
Would I have laid, gazing at the far away expanse of stars, and heaved one final breath, allowing my body to churn in on itself and reduce to pitiful mud, my hair to green and twine with the moss, and my eyes, once a sparkling chestnut to pale to beetle black, rolling into hopeless oblivion?
To this day, the question haunts me. And from it are born more terror-inducing thoughts.
Why did I start to grow again? Why. Who told me to fight for my future? God? Myself? And why, why did it
take
so
l o n g ?
Bitter, bitter regret laces everything I do now. Everything, every step, every goal, every achievement is too late, too little, too few. The weight of it drives me to madness. And longing, longing as I have never known for a time when I would smile, and dream, and dance, and believe takes over my mind. It consumes me, toxic and tantalizing. As I panic to heal, to fight the feelings I used to have, to cover up all traces of my past's existence, to burn them from my memory, to break the surface of those times with bare and bloody hands, I have begun to understand.
There is no going back.
Our lives are made of everyday choices. Just as a single stroke to a single letter creates the epic poem of time, so does my every thought shape my every action, which creates my life.
Yes, my life. I had given up on it, you know. Perhaps you would not think it, if you were to see me, pass me by. But I have fought an indescribable battle. The battlefield was my mind, the victory my soul, and the soldiers were my fear against my hope. Brutal, bloody, and utterly damaging are the battles fought inside. Secret and sinful.
And still, I wake up in a fitful sweat, my mind screaming, begging for proof that I have made it through. That I am free of that hellish regime I fabricated for myself. I still doubt my own thoughts. I question my intentions. And sometimes, God's voice seems far away. I still ache for that time when all was gold and warm and light.
But something is different. A little different. Not even my fear can explain it away, deny it, or cover it up. Where once there was only darkness, I now see a golden hue, just hovering in a crystal thin line on the horizon of my soul. I think it is hope. Hope for something called love. peace. prosperity. faith. happiness.
God sent a silver rope of hope, threaded with dreams and beaded with faith, to pull me from that lifeless marsh. He told me to remember who I am. He told me that nothing ever happens the same way twice, and often, as I stand, I feel not like a soft and silken flower, nor a fresh and tossing wave, but a bright and spitting flame. A pillar of strength, determination, wisdom, and white-hot hope. Because everything is looped, is circled, is connected, and the person I became is from the person I was and will birth the person I will be. Though I fear my past, it gifts me the dear appreciation of my present. It fuels my fierce determination. It forces me to remember.
Remember.
Remembrance is painful, but every time I have resolved to forget, I've lost myself in the process. It is time for me to accept myself, my life, my purpose, my past, my anger, my convictions. I must stop running, stop controlling and
remember
who
I
am.
M.
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