Madness

I've always learned that pain, at least physical pain, has evolved to serve you. Pain receptors lie most on the surface so that you know to back away from the fire when it burns, you know to stay away from accidents because it hurts. It works too. You'd stay away and learn what to stay away from. Memory of the pain lasts, it serves and it's protective. However emotional evolution isn't so perfect yet, is it? That kind of pain debilitates you mentally, physically and emotionally.. Yet the memory of it doesn't last. It doesn't serve. It's like you burn in your heartbreak, in the deepest, darkest pits of hell, but once you swim back up to the surface, barely making it out, you look back and taste the sweetness of love that put you in there in the first place.. you look back, you remember, you reminisce, you hear the days of laughter, the touch of love until you no longer remember your own screams of agony while you burned towards the end of it all. You look back into the pits with nothing but longing. The beautiful memories from the past surface and the dreamy visions of the future. The turmoil, the gut wrenching pain, the resentment, the numbness, the loss and the healing up until that very moment, it all fades. It doesn't serve. You can force yourself to remember the pain, go through it over and over again in your head just so you can hold yourself back from jumping back into the darkness. Yet somehow, the loss of love, the loss of your dreams, the loss of your person, it creeps back into your head, uninvited. Triggers seem to be everywhere. "That's the street we walked on, that's the food we ate together, that's the word he used very often, that's the question he'd ask every night", and it's never "that's how he ripped my soul out of my body and ripped it to shreds with his bare hands". Every night lays heavy on the heart and the body and every muscle, every fiber, every sinew yearns to see, hear and feel that one person, one last time. Again. Even if it means you step back into the hell you just about died coming out of. You pick up the phone, you beg, you plead, you forgive, you forget, you regret, you writhe, flounder, thrash and flail like a fish out of water taking its very last breaths and trying to breathe it back into the person you want so they go back to who they used to be so that you could go back to the person you used to be and it doesn't pain as much to diminish yourself to nothing but a blubbering, whimpering, slobbering mess as much as it does to be rejected again, when he walks away yet again and you find yourself screaming and wailing, sucked back into the darkness where nothing really exists. Except you. All alone. I've been doing that to myself over and over again lately. I've been dragging myself out of hell to throw myself back into it because I feel like I've left something there. I burn each time I crawl out of it. I die within each time. Each trip back into the darkness kills the life within me and each time I walk out of it, I have less and less of me to have, hold and offer to the world around me. I relate more to the darkness than I do to light and love. I lose myself bit by bit and it is only a matter of time before the loving, caring side of me is beaten out of existence because it just costs too much to have. Too many paper cuts all at once, just not enough to kill so I go back in to endure again. I've seen myself change in this neverending, painful cycle that I keep throwing myself into. I've seen myself get stronger. Understanding that you could tear your heart out of your chest and put it at someone's feet and they'll watch you bleed and turn around and walk away anyway hasn't been easy. It didn't add up in my head. It's confusing. You'd want to pick up the bleeding, pulsing, begging, writhing remnant of your life and happiness off the floor, protect it with all that you've got and build a bulletproof wall against the rest of the world because that's the last bit of life you have within you. The resentment that I've fostered towards love itself should terrify everyone I've ever loved, wanted or needed in my life because they may never find me within this mess that I've created of myself. I hope one day the light comes back into my life, maybe seeps back into my eyes too. I hope one day I will wake up and not feel so undeserving and unworthy of love and I hope for everyone else's sake that I don't feel so incapable of loving again. For now, my heart goes out to everyone grieving the loss of the person they once loved, the person they once were and the person they once wanted and hoped to be.. things change. People grow thicker skins. Love your own broken heart, the world will learn to accommodate one more person who cares more about themselves. I often wondered how selfishness worked, now I think maybe it's just love when you barely have any of it left. You have no choice but to use it for your own survival, rightfully so. I just hope it never becomes my way of living.