Breaking Up
One minute you are breathlessly answering their unexpected phone call, blissfully secure in the knowledge that this person desires you, adores you and wants to be with you more than anyone else. Then you hear the heavy tone in their voice and you are transported from your fluffy clouds of paradise to the edge of a dark abyss. What's wrong? You ask. Your tongue shrivels in your mouth and your skin drags on your body as he begins to say the things you never believed you would. "It's all happened so fast." "You deserve someone better." "I'm not ready for a serious relationship". You are now swaying over the edge of the abyss, staring in terror at the darkness beneath. The ground is crumbling beneath your feet and like in a terrible dream, you can do nothing but desperately clutch onto the phone like some flimsy lifesaver. Bravely you continue to listen and pretend that you understand. You pretend that you are ok. Then without warning, just as you think you can keep clinging to calm he says, "I don't feel the the same way about you as you do about me." Your entire body is paralysed. Breath remains immobile inside you while your brain turns into a heavy buzzing swarm. "Are you ok?" You realise you haven't said anything. Breath you idiot. "Yes, yes, I'm fine." You lie but you don't feel ashamed about it - who can care about honesty when your happiness is being massacred? He continues, generously heaping on the arguments like a bad cook heaping cream over a burnt strudle to disguise the taste. You know he must care to be taking so much time to explain. Perhaps you can gauge how much someone doesn't want to hurt you by the minutes they spend breaking up with you over the phone. It's taken 33 minutes. It takes much longer to feel again. Food makes you cringe. Darkness becomes your closest companion - covering you up, hiding you from the cruel, indifferent day. Only the darkness understands how you want to be invisible, silent and alone. Colours, smells and light are like stinging acid on your senses. You know that it won't last forever and this is the only thing that keeps your chest rising and falling, your embattled heart persisting with life. Ice cream and good friends will salve your wounds but for now, you are wounded and crying, waiting for the poison to work itself out of you and let you be whole again.
At soccer training your body is lethargic with melancholy but you burn with a persistent desire to retaliate. That ball becomes the target of your anger. It becomes your pain, your regret, your sadness. People urge you to pass it to them but you are relentlessly pushing it forward, selfishly refusing to pass because you want to do battle now. It's you versus anyone who gets in your way. You sense someone behind you and their foot suddenly connects with yours and you go sliding painfully into the ground. Grass and sand tear at your skin. Now you have a physical injury to match your emotional one. It feels so appropriate you wish the graze was larger, more bloodied, more visible. You wish you could lose it and pick a fight with someone. Just start hitting them until they hit you back because you can't wage war on pain but you can wage war on people instead. Anything except sitting there, tolerating the agony. You just want to, need to, have to do something about it. But there is nothing to do except to wait until that poison has worked itself out of you.
Then you go out bravely from the trenches, ready for love to capture you and hold you captive once again.
At soccer training your body is lethargic with melancholy but you burn with a persistent desire to retaliate. That ball becomes the target of your anger. It becomes your pain, your regret, your sadness. People urge you to pass it to them but you are relentlessly pushing it forward, selfishly refusing to pass because you want to do battle now. It's you versus anyone who gets in your way. You sense someone behind you and their foot suddenly connects with yours and you go sliding painfully into the ground. Grass and sand tear at your skin. Now you have a physical injury to match your emotional one. It feels so appropriate you wish the graze was larger, more bloodied, more visible. You wish you could lose it and pick a fight with someone. Just start hitting them until they hit you back because you can't wage war on pain but you can wage war on people instead. Anything except sitting there, tolerating the agony. You just want to, need to, have to do something about it. But there is nothing to do except to wait until that poison has worked itself out of you.
Then you go out bravely from the trenches, ready for love to capture you and hold you captive once again.
Kalikapsychosis
And your writing is captivating, honest, beautiful. I was so swept away by the truth of your words...