Posts tagged the past
I'm just an indian summer.
now THIS GUY is comedy.
-F. Scott FItzgerald
Today I’m having trouble breathing.
I finally feel like I’m moving ahead- like my past may actually be behind me. But then, bam, just like that I’m thrown back into it.
I want to break down and cry. I want to lay in bed and not show my face to the world. I am just so tired. I’m exhausted. And it hurts. It hurts to hate myself this much. I would never wish these feelings on anyone. I would never want a person to look down and see these scars, to know this shame.
This pain knocks the breath out of me.
Look,
I’m the girl who wakes up at four in the morning and can’t go back to sleep. Not because of bad dreams, or nightmares, or whatever you want to call them. I’m the girl that can’t go back to sleep because when I roll over, I’m crushed that you’re not there. Because in that moment before I open my eyes, you’re laying next to me, just waiting for me to crawl into your arms. I’m that girl. That’s me. Call it pathetic or call it crazy or call it sad, but that’s who I am.
When I was a kid, there used to be a palm frond bush down the street from my house. I would ride my bike over to the bush and play under it for hours.
It was my fortress. My special place. A place where I could do anything and be anyone I wanted to be.
It was an everyday routine for me to go sit inside the bush, my back against the spine, pulling the fronds, pretending they were different levers and gadgets.
One day, as I did every day, I pulled down one of the fronds to find a massive wasps nest. Apparently, wasps do not like the idea of having their home roughly uprooted and sent mid-air. They were abuzz (haha pun) and looking for someone to punish. And there was me. Sweet, innocent, imaginary, five year old me.
That evening, I ran to my house bawling, in excruciating and unimaginable pain. I remember when I got out of a cool shower, my mom put mud on my stings and counted them. I had eighteen. Just one could have killed me if I’d been allergic, and there I was with a dozen and a half. In pain, but alive.
You’re like that bush. You offered solitude, a fortress of strength and love. But when I was comfortable with you, when I finally gave in and became vulnerable with you- When I let myself be naive and innocent and a dreamer, you stung me.
And it hurts, every day it hurts. But somehow, that pain reminds me that I’m alive.
