It's Back

"The prettiest eyes have cried the most tears..."

What I've held to be mind numbing, has haunted me over these past few years.  It's a feeling like no other, something so awful, words seem inadequate when trying to put it together.  I've buried it deep within myself and locked it away, hidden it behind a facade; behind eyes that have lost their luster, behind a smile that's lost its meaning.  It's buried in the deepest depths of my soul, and hidden behind the person I've managed to fake becoming.

I remember it, so painfully overwhelming that it knocked me over.  I fell to the ground unable to stand and face my new fate, and the enormous feelings it was bringing along with it.  The world around me crumbled as I quickly withdrew from the reality surrounding me.  I laid there, crying for the world to see, not caring, not understanding, just breaking, rapidly.  I broke into a million pieces, and it was there, right then I lost my grip on everything I believed in and held true.

From then on a whirlwind of emotions ensued.  Over the next year, I would eventually grow to feel nothing.  It was the nothing I welcomed, the nothing I wanted.  I didn't want to feel or allow myself to feel that which I could not comprehend.  I allowed myself to be consumed with the nothing, like a warm liquid covering my body, drowning me and eventually snuffing out the very source of who I was.  I had become the nothing.

I've lived in my comfortable nothing for a good three years.  Dead to my memories, to myself, to anything remotely painful, or joyous - anything that could hurt me again. I continued by living life on auto pilot, and I was ok with that.  Up until this past weekend - where everything would come crashing down upon me, all over again.

It comes with a smell, or a sound.  Memories flash flood your brain whether you want them to or not, no matter how you've suppressed them, they will haunt you again.  For me it was a song that caused this mental rape of my carefully constructed reality. Half way through this particular song, I had managed to transport back to that broken little girl lying on the concrete, three years ago.  I was there right back in the horrific thing I've focused so hard on killing with my all consuming nothing.

It was everything - the loss of my husband, it was the memories of what I thought we had.  The six years I wasted on a man who never loved me. The feeling of being thrown away by someone who didn't want you.  The fact that you were a decoy in his sadistic adventure, it was all real, all happening - all at once all over again.  I was right back in that pit of despair looking up, waiting to be pulled out by someone who would never show up.

I drove while trying to fight back the flooding of my eyes, my emotions, and trying to urge those thoughts back, trying to push that pain back into its cavern.  But it had erupted from deep within me like  a sea monster exploding from the ocean; tearing the ocean in two and taking it's unsuspecting ships with it back down to the murky depths of the waters.

It came back again today.  It's trying to escape, and I cannot let it.  I've grown to love my nothingness.  I fear that if it escapes again, it will take me over, and not let me go.  It was an all encompassing pain that destroyed my mind, and my spirit.  So strong a pain that nothing I did - no drug, no drink, no amount of sex, or attention could dampen the echoes that it caused.

Still it echoes. It's pain, in the simplest of expressions.  It's very real, and very much still alive. It's the reminder of the horrific reality I had to wake up to those three years ago.

 "My husband is a rapist, he's going to prison, I'm going to lose him, and my life will never be the same."

And it hasn't.