You’re walking along, enjoying the breeze, smelling the flowers, basking in the warmth of the sun, happy songs on your tongue, praise in your heart, joy from head to toe, and then someone runs up to you and punches you in the gut.
Now walk around for a week and pretend that you’re perfectly fine, like you don’t hurt, like you might not at any moment burst into tears because the pain becomes too much.
Shaking it off isn’t easy. You don’t just shrug and decide it won’t bother you. Rather, you get angry that it DOES bother you. Fifteen years later. You thought, or maybe just denied the truth, that it was all behind you, that it couldn’t possibly hurt anymore. And then you lie awake in bed, crying because the pain is fresh, like it just happened. The wounds that you thought were healed have merely been plastered over, a bandaid that was so fleshy you didn’t know that’s what it was.
In a second, it’s all back. It’s in your face, dredging it all up again, and you deny it, no, you don’t feel it, it can’t be there, it can’t hurt anymore, I’m in control, back off, back off, I don’t see you!
You peek out from behind the hands that cover your eyes, and you cannot deny it – it’s there. It’s staring you in the face, the past that you thought was back there, in the past. It showed up, the scraggly cat you know you should ignore, yet you don’t because your heart won’t let you. You feed it and it grows and it’s here for good. Because it never left. It was here the whole time, and damn it, I’m in control, this is my life, but it’s not just my life. It’s someone else’s life, and I wish at that moment I didn’t have a heart, that I could really just turn my back and pretend like I don’t care, no, I don’t, it’s not my concern, leave me the hell alone. But it is, it kind of is. Because I know how it feels, and I have to acknowledge that. I have to.
And yes, this is I, not you. It’s I. Me. My pain, my punch in the gut, my past, my troubles, my heart involved. And I can want all the damn day long that it isn’t here, back for a second helping, but it is. Fifteen years doesn’t make it go away. It just means I’ve lived with it for fifteen years. And then I think, “I hate you!” This isn’t fair and I have been pretty sure I’ve felt nothing for you, but now I know I hate you. This is YOUR past, your decisions, and you died and don’t have to deal with them. I do. Not because I have to, but because I HAVE to. Because it’s not fair – not to me, not to my children, and not to this little girl, all innocent, all affected by the decisions you made, thinking only of yourself. Never no one else.
There it is, the anger, the pain, the frustration, all dug out of the ground again, putrid and horrid and in my face. My gut hurts, my head aches, and my heart, oh my heart, it feels what needs to be done and wants to reach out and make it all okay again, but it knows. For a week, I have sat in this mess of filth from the past, trying ever so hard not to let it hurt, but maybe it needs to hurt again. Maybe I need to keep crying it out. Does it ever go away?
Dead for almost thirteen years and I still feel you standing over me. I smell your cologne on someone and for a brief moment, I smile, and then I want to throw up. Our time together is like that – a brief moment of good, following by pain and sorrow and a broken me.
I cry into my pillow because I don’t think anyone will understand. I should be over all of this. I should be able to keep a straight face and tell it, and deal with it, and not be afraid of it. Which reaction is my truth? Am I lying when I’m okay, or when I’m not? In an instant, I am 20-year-old me again, not good enough, not pretty enough to keep my husband loving only me. I am sickly and trying to stay healthy, trying to take care of my babies, trying to live out my happily-ever-after, because this time it’s for real, this time he means to love us the right away. And then it’s all over and my love is shattered once and for all. That’s what I realize as I cry – that this memory hurts the most, more than the night he died, because it’s when I stopped loving him. It’s when he hurt me worse than any other time. And though we went on for two more years, right then, this memory, this ghost from the past that is here now, that is when it was really over. When I accepted it and let it happen. When I gave up.
I love my life now and have a wonderful husband who would never hurt me like that, and so it shouldn’t hurt anymore, it really shouldn’t, but as the tears roll down my cheeks and this screen becomes blurry, I know that I’m still a little broken inside, a little lost still, and maybe I’ll always be.
Write it out, Angela, write it out. Release it, let it go, cry, and cry, and cry, and let it go.
And now do the right thing.
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