You’ve been staring on a busy street for hours now. If you could paint a color for each thought that visits your mind, well, your canvass would be pretty messy. One minute you are “putting” words on people’s mouth the next minute felt like you’re struggling as you are being pulled underwater. When these kind of images rushes through your head you snap out by shaking your head. It’s silly but it’s good enough. It’s been like this for months now. Ten months to be exact. You are much better now. Better but not healed. So you proudly trip back to your memories and wonder how the hell were you able to hold it together.
Step I: Bottom…
You remember the first week. “Wait, how do you remember the first week?“, you asked. Yeah, how do you remember something when you spent the last remaining strands of your everything trying to forget that something. The intro alone felt like your heart is being pushed into a small box. You discovered that incident wasn’t the end. It’s the beginning of the end. Because it gets worst.
At one point, you actually told yourself that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger“. Big laugh. Inside you feel pathetic because you know that there is no way you are strong. You are dead inside. How can anyone expect you to be strong if the remaining strength you have is reserved for breathing, procrastinating and self-loathing. It doesn’t even feel like living anymore, it’s more of floating. That’s the perfect way to describe how you exist. Not surviving, just floating. A dead meat that gets lucky and being pushed by the current. Everyday you struggle by waking up and letting time push you through the day. So “strong” would be the last word that can describe you. Now take off the face and wear your grievance where it would nicely fit you.
Step II: Rock bottom…
So you desperately try to move on. You’ll do anything for a temporary high. Anything to numb your mind away from the pain. Anything. This is you running away. You actually believe that you can run away from all of these. You are such a fool for even believing that you are capable of fixing your mess. Idiot. You have the nerve to do things that happy people do because you believe that it can make you happy. Idiot-er. Then you’d realize that you’ve just thrown yourself into another mess because everything around you just remind you of the times before.
And it’s like a quicksand, One mistake leads to another. And another. And another. And another. And another. Next thing you know is you are buried under your complications. And you finally stop. Stop – the first right thing you did in months. You realized that, maybe, doing nothing is actually better than doing something. That the right thing to do is to sit, wait and take the pain as it gnaws you inside. That you never really gotten away from pain, you just delayed it. You just prolonged it. Now it makes sense, “sometimes, the shortest way to relief is pain”.
Step III: Leftovers
And after a while, when tiredness finally claims you, you somehow find it weirdly comforting. It’s not the best feeling in the world, but it’s better than those in-between moments of temporary highs. Or those moments before consciousness leaves your body. It’s a cheap bargain, but it’s all you’ve got. Because for the first time you are not fighting anymore. You’re done trying. There is nothing left to do but to move forward. “I never thought that moving forward could be this painful“, you surrendered.
Step IV: Congratulations, you are now officially ‘damaged’ from this point forward, so keep walkin’!
Now you wake up to a morning with the same sun that’s gray and where everything is dull. Yet it feels different. Not because it doesn’t hurt anymore but because you’ve accepted, not understood, that there will always be pain. There will be images that will rush randomly on your mind, there will always be moments that you will be reminded of her. The difference is now you can look back at the pain and smile. You now remember her the way you should. You painfully remember how she made that part of your life the best part of your life. You remember the feeling and the insanity. And this time you’re smiling.
You’re healing. Not healed just healing. You’re learning to breathe again.
I believe that however you move on, it will involve at least two things: pain and time. There are no detours. It’s the only way through.
This blog entry is dedicated to an old friend. How much I miss her and how much I wish that I could sit with her, drink coffee and talk about life like we used too.
