Shatter Me

Emotional drowning has a lot in common with actual drowning. You can feel yourself slowly sinking into the depths of darkness as icy tendrils of fear caress your skin and mind, wrapping themselves around you… making you their home. The light slowly fades away, bathing you in blackness… swallowing you. It happens silently, there is no thrashing at the water’s surface, screaming out for help… you simply vanish beneath the waves, plummeting slowly into your tomb. Both are just as final, bringing death in different ways, but death, nonetheless. Perhaps emotional death is far worse a fate though, left to wander this world a shell of a person. The lights are on, but no one is home.             They say there is a place that the soul goes after death, a sort of paradise in the next world. But what is there after emotional death? There is no Heaven. No Summerlands. No Valhalla. There is only death… an end to what once was. Perhaps that is what drives us to feel alive, not a fear of physical death… but the fear of an emotional one. The emotion doesn’t matter to us in the end; fear, love, pain, lust… they’re all the same when you are desperate to feel something. To feel anything. Maybe that’s why adrenaline junkies keep pushing the limits. Maybe they can feel themselves dying emotionally and are racing to stop it; to shock their minds back to life. That’s all death is really isn’t it? A race against the clock, a race to fill this life with so many memories and moments that the people we leave behind can hold onto a piece of us until we are ultimately forgotten; those precious memories and moments claimed by time, allowing them to fade out of existence until even the thought of us is no more.             Maybe that’s what I was running from… the idea of forgetting. Forgetting you. Forgetting her... Forgetting me. Time claims everything eventually, and here I was, thinking that I could outrun it. Thinking that I might have a chance to keep the pieces of you that you left behind for me. Deep down, I know that I cannot hold onto you, that time will catch me eventually, stealing you from me one laugh, one smile, one moment at a time. But I am desperate, and I will do whatever it takes to keep what bits of you that I have left. I tried writing them down, scrawling every single little detail down across the pages of my journal, the way that you smelled like honeysuckle and warm summer days, the way that your green eyes would flash with flecks of gold in the sunlight, the way that your laugh could light up the room. But deep down I knew that when I looked back on the pages, I would read the words as though they were the words of a stranger… you would be a stranger.             Now, here I am, sitting in the dark of a hotel room with the warm neon glow of a bar sign stretching out across the floor trying to think of a way to hold onto you. I can feel you slipping through my fingers, each memory and moment growing dim as they begin to bury themselves into the parts of my brain that I cannot access. Dreams of you that were once so vivid I would wake up searching for you have now shifted until you are no more than a face in the crowd. Maybe if I just move on with each day, I won’t notice you fading away… but what if I do. What if I notice that one day, I cannot recall the spattering of freckles across your nose? What if one day I remember that I can’t hear your voice bounding around in my head. What if I forget the way that your warmth raged through me like a wildfire, consuming all of the bad bits and burning them away with your light.             That is what you were after all, a wildfire burning everything that you touched, setting it ablaze with your infinite beauty. And I would always remember that while you were beautiful and wild and captivating… you were also painful. You destroyed everything that brought me happiness, consuming it until there was nothing left but a city of ashes. You were perfectly destructive. You took everything and yet, while you were taking it, I didn’t care. Your beauty was blinding, swallowing me until I didn’t care what you took, until I would have given you every single piece of me if it meant that you would stay for even one second longer. But you didn’t. You always left, always took everything that I had to give and then vanished, leaving me a broken shell of the person that I had spent years trying to build. I would be back to the place I was before you found me and I would have to start over, have to start building myself back up into a complete person once again. And then, like a snake creeping out of the grass, you would return, pulling me back into your tangled web of lies and love, injecting every aspect of my life with your venom and waiting for me to wither in your grasp.             Why is it that everything in this world that is beautiful is also painful? You are everything that is wonderful, but you also slice away pieces of me and leave me bleeding in a heap. Why am I even trying to hold onto you? Are you really even worth it? Is all the pain painted with pretty backgrounds and lovely words really worth keeping with me forever? This is what you do to me, you leave me crumbling and falling apart at the seams, begging you to come back and yet desperate to keep you away… knowing that it is you that is slowly destroying me. I know that I should let you go, that I should let time claim you for itself and pull you from my memories, but I can’t… but then again, this time you won’t come back again… will you? This time there will be no return, no serpent wrapping itself so tightly around me that it feels as though I will shatter. You are truly gone this time…