Nothing

Sometimes you believe you were born broken. Or perhaps it was the brutality of the world that pulled you apart. Slowly, but surely, over time. Now it seems you have become a mass of gaping wounds, that get so cruelly prodded here and there. Often by well meaning folks, but occasionally by those that are so caught up in their own misery, they don’t even see how deep they cut with just an ill-placed word, a look, or sometimes simply silence.

It’s the latter that hurts the most though isn’t it. The inability to communicate when it’s so desperately wanted and in need. That’s the kind of inaudible noise that starts to deafen over time. Kills you with the longing. The deep desire to know the unknown. And often, in the absence of answers, you start to make them up. Create fiction in your head so strong you’d swear it was the truth.

And when you can’t find the truth and your feral mind has been driven insane by its own version, you’ll start to seek it out at any cost, only it’s usually you that ends up paying. ‘Cause you can’t unread the lines. Cold and heartless as they are. The ones that reduce you to a paragraph of nothing. The ones that dig deep into your biggest wound. That one that never heals.

You read those lines with no surprise, yet filled with disappointment. Although it wasn't the first time you’d read them, nor been made to feel that way and it wasn’t the disscontempt from which they were produced that eroded you as it did. Ultimately, it was the echoing of all your greatest fears and insecurities being outlined by the hand of the one person you trusted to accept them, not make them a reason for leaving.

That’s the thing though, when you give yourself to love; in order to do it fully, you need to give yourself completely. Wounds and all. You must purge your greatest failures and trust the other person not to judge you. Because it’s not the totality of you, but it is a part and it’s a part you try to hide; that broken, messy, bitter side. The ugly bit. The bit you think no one will love. But they do, the right ones always do.

Yet you can’t know who the right ones are until you show them. Lay bare before them, defenceless, vulnerable, still raw from the last one who fooled you into thinking you were safe, before you stumbled upon the reality that damn near killed you with its cruelty. You know only too well that you’ll run through a hundred disappointments ‘til you find the one strong enough to carry your despair.

The one who looks at you as you crumble into nothing and still sees something worth picking up. Something worth loving. The one who doesn’t tear you apart with their constructive criticism. The one who doesn’t look at you like you’re something to fix. The one who accepts you in your current state, knowing you could be more, you could be better, but that you might never grow to be.

And you know from experience they exist, because you’ve found them once before. They showed you a type of love that terrified you. That in some way revolutionised, yet its impact was such that when it was over, you realised you’d spend your whole life trying to find something that’d match it. Because everything seemed somewhat superficial after that. A little pointless. If it wasn’t real, it wasn’t right.

So, now you lay awake at night, thinking over where it all went wrong. How you didn’t realise. How you could have put so much trust into someone that so casually broke it, without so much as an apology. You reread the words you’ve memorised, from the page you photographed inside your mind. Each syllable never ceasing to sting. The betrayal, the disappointment, the hurt. It all still cutting like a knife.

They told you they saw you, really saw you, where others had previously failed to do so. Yet in the end, they took those fractured pieces you had so courageously trusted to show them and used them against you. Used them to blindly break you where you were only just mending. Destroying the little fragmented good that was left. And now, once again, the world seems like the brutal place you always feared it to be.

Now you’re left to carry the weight of all your heartaches, whilst doing your best not to let them drown you, as you set off to swim those tides again. You tell yourself what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, yet you know you’re more fragile than before. Because some bruises don’t heal, some breaks don’t mend and some things can’t be forgiven.