My Life in Ink

It’s in the smallest moments that I find love.

Like when we’re doing our homework sprawled out on my bed and you get a problem right after struggling over it a while. You do this little fist pump and I can’t help but look up from my own work and laugh. You are the biggest distraction because I can’t stop myself from watching you.

Or the times that you’re laying next to me in bed and your breathing gets ragged and I reach down and lace our fingers together, and your breath calms. When I feel like my touch heals your aches and pains, and I am your saving grace.

It’s the moments when I catch you watching me from across the room and you respond to my questions with only a smile. It’s when you kick your feet like a child when you’re happy about something and evading my questions of your stares with smiles and kisses.

The moments that I find myself falling so hard and so fast that I try to catch myself and back peddle away from you but there’s nothing left to grip on to because the only things my hand can hold now is your heart.

I find my love for you in the small gestures. Opening my door and telling me you’ll never let me pay for dinner. Taking care of me and renewing my faith in humanity. And yes, I get worried. There’s this deep dark past that you keep to yourself. I don’t fear it hurting me, but it consuming you to the extent that I can’t reach you any longer.

It’s in the times in the night, when you wrap your arms around me and you don’t feel ashamed to cry that I love you more than ever. 

You liar. You hypocrite. You threw him away with a careless gesture of your hand and now you find me raising his soul from the ashes you left behind and you have the nerve to be angry. You feel entitled to hold a vice grip on his everything to keep him away from me, is that it? What other reason would you have for slandering my efforts for a man you didn’t care enough for and that makes up my world?

You are a poor shadow of a human. You never learned to love the way I did, through pain and suffering and trying. I suppose in the end that’s my fault. I was so scared of you becoming like me - damaged, beaten, bruised - that I wanted to keep you from getting hurt. In the end that’s probably what you needed. Consequences to take their toll on your body and mind so that you could understand the weight another’s heart feels like in your hands.

Instead I warped you. I put you up in a tower like Rapunzel and kept you from the real world. Now I have left you to your own devices and the world is creeping in to take what’s finally theirs and you don’t know how to handle it. I should have taught you better. I should have known better. But I didn’t. I was young and afraid for the delicate flower of a girl I found so many years ago.

Now I am in love with the man who loves you. I am fighting against your shadow every day to spare his heart from the cracks you formed. You took him and you broke him. Do you want to take him back from me? Do you intend to steal him away a second time, and for what? To spite me? To tell me you’re better? Why are you angry, you have no right. Take him if you can, but I am not going to stop for anything.

There are times in life when everything is a jumbled mess. No making heads nor tails of anything and trying to find a thread to begin explaining is like trying to find that damn needle in your mental proverbial haystack. It’s the hardest thing to have something on your mind, encompassing waking moments, and moments when you shouldn’t be awake at all and not knowing how to express it because you have no idea where to even begin.

When is it that you realize you love someone? A day, a week, a month; is there such a thing as an appropriate time to realize such a thing? Why is it we feel there has to be a certain span of time that passes at all? We all want that picture perfect love, so why is it a bad thing when someone thinks they’ve found it faster than “enter this amount of time here.” Society has built us into these feeling bottling little things. Emotions are scary, complicated and messy. Never to be toyed with or spoken of. They are instruments of torture and if you express them, you’re weak. Something to be ridiculed for. Heaven forbid.

The reality is though, no one is the best at hiding emotions. Something always slips through and shows us for what we really are. Messy, and complicated, and scared of getting hurt. Putting your heart out there is never the easiest thing in the world. I’ve done it countless times with mixed results. Every encounter I’ve had though has, in time, given me the knowledge that let’s me know today that I am falling in love.

All the heartbreaks, mine and theirs, all the missed chances and the ones you walked away from. The puppy love, to the crushes, all of it has meant something to me. When I fall, I do it fast and I do it hard. Rather, I did. Past tense. I let those fears and worries take control of me. I boxed up my heart and thought it a better idea to go slowly and think about consequences and long term and whether it was all worth it.

I forgot that falling in love is always worth it. You just don’t always see it that way at the time.

I have to build myself back up from the blow. It shattered me to the core, and I stand now naked in just the faults that make me human. I leave behind the pieces of what I was. Perhaps I shall take a few of them as keepsakes. As mementos to remind myself of who I was before this moment. Reminders to never become that person again; closed off and scared to move forward.

Perfection does not exist in the ways we wish it could. We cannot become some god like creature of myth. We can, however, choose to let every break in our heart, every crack in our skin, be filled in by something greater, instead of filling the holes with self doubt and worry. Those are materials that cannot keep a person together. They grow with time and slowly tear you apart at the seams. No, instead cement your broken pieces together with things that bring about beauty; self worth, trust, passion.

We are far from being who we want. I wear this fact close like a weight hanging from my neck. It is never forgotten that I am always changing. Every heart break, every loss of faith, every betrayal strips you of something amazing. Sometimes it tears you apart all together. I am now the latter. I see myself clearer than I ever have before. Clarity you can only find in the eye of the storm. I know that I must fight against the hardships brought on by anxiety and fear. It won’t be an easy battle, but I will walk away from the casings of my former self, a new me.

I can only hope that this time I’m making myself with stronger stuff.

I want to say I’m okay, but I’m not. I’m still far from it. I feel sick to my stomach and I have to force food because the pain is too much to bear and I can’t keep dragging everyone else down with me. I don’t get to be the one who cries and hurts and bleeds. I am supposed to be the one who saves and helps.

But betrayal isn’t some prettily worded thing. It’s not like heart break where you can string beautiful metaphors to express your sadness. That doesn’t give justice to the brutality of all that is betrayal. It’s not some lonely walk in the park, it’s a knife in your shoulder blades being dragged down your spine. It’s a punch to the gut so you fall to the ground and repeated blows so you can’t get back up.

That’s betrayal.

It’s shrinking from everyone because you’re a soul under fire. Every friend is a hidden enemy and suddenly you aren’t even safe in your own room. You feel like a veteran from war. Scarred and bruised and battered and scared. Because even in a room of loved ones, you no longer believe anyone has your back. You can’t trust it to them now. You’re broken. So you press yourself up against a wall and you watch them like hawks and you attack before being attacked.

One day you’ll be alone. Really alone, because those friends you push away will try to save you first. But you’ll be too stubborn, too hurt to let them. You’ll keep pushing and eventually it’ll work. Eventually they’ll stop coming back and they’ll leave you and your festering betrayal, the wound you never let heal. It’s not a scar, no. It’s a wound that you pick at and stab again and again to remind yourself it’s there. You never let it stop bleeding because if you do, then you could forget it exists. And betrayal is something you only want to go threw once. So you keep it open.

And it’ll bleed you dry. Until you’re nothing left but a skeleton and a pool of spilled blood.

Because that’s betrayal.