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Talking, chatting with friends, sharing stories and words and jokes as if they were a jar of sweet taffies to pass around. They talk and talk and talk with friends. It's a careless attitude in the air, a joyful air that reeks of familiarity. No room for secrets or caution when they’ve known these people for so long so their words tumble out of lips like feathers and the words fall and rest their weight against shoulders like bricks.
“That’s...that’s not okay,”
A sentence, simple words turn into bitter cold ice water that flushes down their spine. It’s shock, the world turning, jolting realization of what it is. The cold bite joining blood, the tingle of frost reaching the tip of their ears, the tips of their nose, the tops of their fingers and toes. Silence is a deafening ring nearly palatable. There's a pause that passes at a too fast, too slow rate all at once.
“O-oh”
Dry pencil shavings and cotton fill their mouth and throat forcing itself towards their lungs, an issue to force air out of their lungs to speak. Somehow everything becomes clearer, sharp yet undefined as it becomes out of focus at the same time. Then there’s a crystalline ice filling arteries in place of blood leaving a heavy chilling numbness as shock fades to leave an anxiety and panic.
Worry, concern, pity all things of slight after a period of time. After bleeding wounds on a heart become sluggish and molasses instead of the slick oil of blood. Once the realization is no longer fresh the inquiries of well-being fade and eventually stop altogether.
There is a certain pain to healing, to the realization of pain and the aftermath that comes with it, and one would think it’s contradictory. If they’re unaware of pain they will not feel it, unaware of wounds that bleed and the world that worries the gouges into larger growing tears. Black cavities of a heart ripped out, emptiness and hollow that ring into their very being. Being unaware brings no such realization to let the gut-wrenching pain leak through, though it is not like the pain never existed. The pain was subtle discomforts like aches but they’re now aware of what the aches really are, wounds. They’re now forced to bandage and care and clean the wounds; left by someone who now smiles happily of their own devices.
This pain is one that lingers. The memories don’t leave, sticking within their mind. It's the type that sticks and coats and consumes the entirety of their mind in the dead of night creating a fitful insomnia. An insomnia only culled by pure exhaustion, one that runs so deep into the bone that the mind doesn't have the strength to remember. Then when they wake in the morning memories claw at their mind once again. The memories create a life that is like walking through tar. So much effort for the smallest gains as the deathtrap that is tar pulls, trying to swallow them whole.
Some days are starkly different to the tar, an eerily peaceful that still feels wrong. Those days they feel as if they’re floating in shallow water. Floating letting the push and pull of the ocean drag them along, they fade in and out of existence with the rhythm of the tides. They are still not in control, unable to touch the ground, unable to feel the sand and shells and only the muted press of lukewarm water. Somehow both the tar and tides are equally painful.
Within their pain or maybe when it has started to fade, but when everything still hurts and it’s hard to function or breathe- the anger is simmering. Their anger comes on the late nights, the nights where the pain is all-encompassing and the tar feels like it’s drowning them, forcing itself into each and every one of their senses, muffling them and blurring everything into one and nothing leaving nothing but pain to surface. The anger comes out then. The pain shifting to rage in a tantrum like flurry, because the tar burns, the tar burns and burns and boils at their skin having it slip off their bones until there’s nothing but a tortured mind. So they scream, and they cry, and they wreck everything around them, they take the pain out on the world. The same world who allowed this someone to hurt them and that let the tar boil and they think “why?”
“Why me?”
“Why would you do this?”
“Why did you do this to me?”
Questions that someone will never answer and nothing anger itself can answer.
They don’t know why they were hurt, why every day is harder than it needs to, why their whole life has been flipped upside down. If they find no conclusion on why they’re in pain, gut-wrenching horrible pain, and why someone would hurt them- tear their heart out and chew it to pieces then try to fill the gaps with burnt sugar- that means it's their fault. They deserved the pain. Maybe this agony is irrational and they have no reason for the wounds in their heart, maybe these wounds are illusions and they're the one who hurt someone. So now they fight through tar telling themselves that the boiling sticky tar is earth under their shoes. So they sink into tar as they try to walk as it is dirt gravel and sand, insisting upon themself that it is, while no one else thinks of it as earth, they tell themself,
“it’s my fault.”
They tell themself a lot of things, lies, and half-truths coated and covered in honey so it's easier to swallow. If lies covered with sickly sweet sugar aren’t to deal with shame and the self-blame that have joined the tar, it's to say that they’re okay. Once a stranger had told them that if you say something enough it’ll become true, they can’t say that they don't think of it as anything more than an old wives tale. As they’ve been the phrase “I’m okay” over and over and over with a desperateness for truth to themselves and everyone else as they sink further into dark tar.
They feel as if guilt is trying to swallow their heart. It feels like someone whispering in their ear saying,
“you deserve this.”
“if you had been less stupid it wouldn’t have happened to you.”
“you’re so naive no wonder it happened to you”
“maybe if you noticed”
“there’s so much you could’ve done so why are you blaming me?”
“it's all your fault.”
The whispers clutter in their mind as they’re continued to be swallowed by tar. It hurts, they really only have known this torment for too long.
The memories aren’t always bad, and maybe that’s what hurts the most. That someone didn’t only cause wounds and it hurts more than the actual wounds because someone caused good thoughts and feelings and memories. Like someone would give them flowers, that someone listened, that someone said they cared. So maybe what they feel is irrational, that they are too sensitive, that someone was only good and they have turned someone into a villain, when actually they are the villain. That they were the one to hurt, to cut into someone’s heart and left someone to bleed out and die.
There are days aside from the tar and tides, days when guilt and blame are less adamant on swallowing them whole. These days though the burden to walk and breathe and smile is lightened, they still don’t feel right. These days there’s cockroaches crawling under their skin, crawling up their throat, and chewing on their veins. Nothing feels quite right, like a bad rendition of the goldilocks tale, except nothing quells to perfect. Not right, it feels okay, too good to be wrong and too wrong to be good. There’s a static and electric paranoia that sits in their spine and everything is uneasy. These days it’s more as if chains are drilled into their bones to weigh them down. It’s unlike the tar, which pulls and fights against every move they make, these chains are different. The chains make it hard but it feels less impossible than the tar, these days, these days are okay.
Before they know it, time has passed. The thick tar has turned into something more liquid, it’s not so hard to fight anymore. Now it’s easier to touch the ground when the ocean takes them, they can feel the sand now. Sometimes, they look back on all the days before the hurt and pain and all the days during it. Each day was like changing their skin, keeping a small feature they liked, merging those features until they build a new skin, a permanent one, one that they don’t quite recognize as themself. They know it’s them when they look in the mirror but they look older and aged like cheese or wine, but less elegant. This aging wasn’t elegant it was messy and full of pain. So maybe they aged more like a book, forgotten to time but never destroyed its pages filled with stories. They have changed their heart and mind, and they’ve added page upon page. They feel good. Maybe not every day they feel happy, but they have their brilliant days. Ones where they feel like diamonds in light. Other days tar tries to swallow them whole once again but they get by and it’s okay. Life is good. There are days where the electric anxiety, from being safe of all things, where they nearly crave the pain again the familiarity of fear and tar. Nonetheless, life is good.