I don’t know where to start, what words to begin this chunk of my life, this long, dark, heavy chunk. It started with my stomach, rejection, fatigue. New rules were made and my mind hated it, and I clung to the comforts I once knew instead of finding new outlets. I holed myself up in my room. I had one solace, my heart, my crutch. After all the pain and all the tears she held me up and I leaned further and further into it, trusting the fall. My mind began to wander more than it had before, letting itself merge into boredom and finding entertainment in mindless games and endless music. Hate began to pore into the empty holes in my day, hate for the weather, hate for work, hate for school. I just wanted to be with my crutch, in my cave, I wanted forever. Nothing looked good, my body filling new voids, folding in more places, filling my jeans. My button popped off one day and I realized my face was covered with more red spots and swollen from sugar and from tears. I tried to grasp onto the last things I had, but nothing worked, they slipped from me, and I jumped onto my crutch, taping it together so it would stay, so worried it wouldn’t that I didn’t have a second to pray. I forgot, I forgot everything, I started to wander, I didn’t save my assignments, I started to lie. The lying, it was so easy.
And then came the days in the burning heat, the days I’ve pushed out of my head, the days I can’t write about. There’s so much to write that I haven’t written it, and my fingers hesitate to put them down because I don’t want to remember the pain. Every time I think about it my stomach turns over, my tongue retreating to hold back the tears, and I can’t. The fatigue and the boredom, the frustration, the confusion, clinging to my crutch, writhing in fear at night. I laid in my sleeping bag and held my eyes shut with tears sneaking out their corners, clenching my fists and holding my breath so that nothing would crawl into my insides. My heart leaped with fear constantly for the first month, and she pushed it off, didn’t understand. It attacked my stomach next, the tears coming easier now, the fear giving way to hunger, the emptiness eating me alive and continuing in the searing pain when I woke up. I laughed, but I laughed less, and I knew I was fading, and I knew she was leaving, and one day, everything fell apart. I started yelling, I started crying, I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t understand. Blinded by something that held me back, I called out to my crutch that seemed to prefer another and I couldn’t understand—YOU WERE MADE FOR ME, my body screamed, and I couldn’t separate the storms in my mind from the newfound weakness in my body. The hate I had bottled started to leak out into my veins, into my heart, and I saw out of a dirty film that plastered everything and everybody around me. The silent screams in my head ate me alive like termites in a rotten log, taking away my sanity and my humanity. I called out to an invisible God and I couldn’t form my thoughts, I couldn’t hear my sentences, and I thought PRESS ON! I MUST! but my feet collapsed under me and the lies continued in the promises, the promises that never ended, the promises that left empty, and the promises that couldn’t be kept. I sobbed when her fingers slipped away from me getting onto that plane, and I knew I had lost the one thing holding me up.
Getting my sickly self back into life never happened after that. My crutch broke in half. I was tormented by an unseemly power. Everything from the previous 20 months came beating down on me, and when I thought I was blinder than ever, my mind took a leave of absence. Through the countless fights and attacks, needles pinched my heart. The pain started small, in my neck, and began to spread into my chest, where I would feel knuckles grabbing at my heart, forcing me to misunderstand until I collapsed in sobs, heaving breaths of mania, panicking until my body would reject me completely and try to vomit the devil out. I couldn’t live. I chose death. I gave in, I chose death, and she left me. My solace, my most precious, my everything, my crutch, she ran. She ran to the thing which so irritated my swollen body and I imagined that it would kill me. It kills me to write this. I can’t write through my tears, and I regret it more than anything. My bones wish to reverse the past, everything in my body aches to have her in my arms again, to be the strong one, to be the one who can make everything better, to mend what’s been broken.
But as the laws of nature would have it, everything good must have its opposite, and karma must take its toll. My crutchless months threw me back and forth, tossing me like a rusty can that’s slipped out of the garbage bin, banging against every loose object and stone until it’s dented and cracked. And as I was forced to bandage myself up, licking my bleeding wounds, it seemed that they were re-opened so many times that I had to forget about my crutch and learn to limp. I don’t know if I’ll ever heal, but I’ve learned to limp, and meanwhile, the crutch lies without a purpose, broken from the whole ordeal. I love her, and I can’t live while she’s broken. My heart has been sanded, made smoother from a piece of raw sandpaper, brushed away in the erosion of the storm, but it’s been left raw and sore. It hurts from the past, it hurts from the pain, and I have no callouses anywhere. Pain everywhere.
So why write?
I’m doing this for me. I’m doing this for 2017, the year I fell, the year I lost the best thing that has ever happened to me. The year that pulled me back further than I’ve been before, the year that humbled me to my bones, the year that dragged away my hope and tainted my faith. For 365 days I’ve been tossed about like a bottle in the waves, but without a message and without precious cargo. I’ve felt worthless, I’ve felt hopeless, I’ve felt useless, and I’ve felt like a murderer. I’ve felt love greater than any love and hate darker than most, and I’ve been confused almost every one of these days. I’ve been tormented by a soul that isn’t my own, and that has tormented the ones I’ve cared about, and I’ve been replaced by someone I don’t know.
So this is for me, and this is for you 2017, you selfish thing.
I’m throwing you away.
I’m throwing away the pain,
and I’m throwing away the confusion.
All the anger, hate, the lies, and depression.
I’m throwing out the anxiety.
I’m throwing away my pride,
and I’m taking with me everything I’ve broken,
carrying it with me on my back,
holding it until it feels loved,
replacing parts if necessary.
I’m taking with me the love I’ve felt,
and I’m going to learn to spread it,
taking the humility,
and finding my Father.
I’m taking more than you took from me,
and I’m not letting anyone have it back.
And for the ones who stood by me, the ones who believed in me the most, I’m taking strength for you too, and I’m holding you close. I’m not strangling you anymore, but thanks for letting me piggyback and choke your necks for a while. Thanks to the ones who didn’t just stand on the shore, the ones who jumped straight into the ocean, into the riptide while I was carried away. Thanks to my leaders and thanks to the ones who loved me the most. Thanks to my crutch, the one who left but came back, the one who suffered the very most, who deserves more than the world, and who I don’t know if I can help. We’re all broken a little bit, but 2017 has been our greatest foe up until this point, and we’ve defeated it.
this is for the wastebasket.
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