I wear the most delicate armour that from a distance looks like unbreakable steel, an impenetrable and decorated costume that intrigues you into looking closer but the closer you look the more you realise its not made of iron, or any other kind of metal, but skin, only skin, but layers and layers of it, each as thin as paper telling stories, intricately woven scar tissue, soft to the touch but moulded into the shape of me, into life by a thousand cuts.
At first it could barely hold the weight of words. Fragile. Barely holding silence. A colourless movement of air holding me together, hoping time stands still long enough for me to catch my breath before it washes over me, sewing the pieces together as I go like trying to blow bubbles in a hurricane. Eventually what was left was my threads pulled together into something resembling strength in the outline of who I want to be.
And within it, these words grew back in me.
Fuck you for ever making me feel like I’m difficult to love, for convincing me so thoroughly I believed it for myself, robbed me of the love I needed most, til I became the ghost haunting my own life, an observing shadow with a numbness to the experience. I don’t want to build up an immunity to feeling, to connection, to put up walls around the void. To get used to the absence of everything.
I’d rather feel every pain imaginable just to remind me that the opposite is real because that pain doesn’t dig a hole in my heart, Its never been solid enough to crack like concrete, it only makes the river wider at the edges and the rapids flow deeper down stream. And in it all I’m just trying to learn how to see myself through my own intentions instead of the eyes and their actions. Remind myself to love from the top of an overflowing heart and know I am the river, the bubbles and the hurricane.
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