I don’t have it in me to hate or berate myself any longer. Those classics served me well for a long time, but no more. I am not happy with my struggles or choices but I can no longer pretend everything I might find fault with in myself is reason enough for my utter, crushing loneliness or for the wild, reckless ways in which I long and love. Most would read that as an uplifting thing; I find only a new kind of tiredness within.
For without myself to hate, I lose the only outlet of that terrifying fear that makes up so much that is me. I sit here, night after night and with every word I push a drop of pus from my oldest wound. But it seems I’d need a million words, a million drops, and even then I would not have excised a fraction of a fraction. I feel like a wild child, trapped in my own head, bouncing from wall to wall, ceaselessly, seeking a non-existent exit.
Instead of finding it, every wall is plastered with memories of her. And I am not allowed to look, not even once. Because she never looked back, and every reminder sets a new chain around my heart and squeezes. Oh, how tightly they squeeze, and yet fail to end me. Why could she not have hesitated, just once?
There we arrive, now, at the present. The ongoing struggles. On the one hand tests the question: ‘Do I let myself find fault in her memory, so that I might begin to close this wound?’ I could. I could do it, so easily. It would be only half-truths, twisted to my purposes. But it would work, as it has worked before. It isn’t clean or nice or right. But it would work. Unfortunately, it isn’t even as simple as that.
Because, on the other hand, there is an even deeper, more insidious problem and question waiting for me. Even if I manage to let myself corrupt her memory, the question becomes: ‘Am I ready to be empty again?’ You see, all this hurt and pain still has, at its core, a beautiful person. One whom I adore, and who at least pretended—for a time—to feel the same. And if I kill the last shreds of belief in that pretence…
The cold, hard weight that now occupies my chest is nothing compared to the gasping, grasping, deadening feeling of having nothing to even fill my chest. I fear the nothing will kill me even faster than the strain she puts on my heart. So, for now, I hold tight to what is killing me slower. I hold tight to her, she who never looked back.