Tag Archives: hurt

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Rebuilding.

If you truly love something, set it free. You’ll love it more, even if you find, you now love it differently.

I should be angry. Maybe. I know that I’m unhappy with how quickly you moved on. With how a few months of a different routine and a different city was enough for you to find a different woman. I’m unhappy about that, too. Maybe I could have forgiven you falling in love easier, had there been any cause whatsoever for me to forgive you. My vanity is bruised by it- I thought I’d loved you more, loved you enough for all those years to have damaged you more- but I didn’t. Or, to be precise, you didn’t. You didn’t love me enough to be damaged by a lack of me there. And a new routine and new city was enough for you to be ready, for a new woman. And not even for new love. Just a new bedmate.

So I’m angry at that. Or maybe anger is too strong a word for this vague displeasure. This bruised ego that would have been soothed by finding out that you were struggling a little too. This part of me that is insulted by how smoothly you moved on, without having felt my absence as acutely as I did yours. I think I wanted you to be a little unhappy. Just enough to afford some passing last respect to the remains of who we were. What we were. It feels too soon. Bringing your new girlfriend to your wife’s funeral, soon. Not the fact that I know of it, though, but the fact that it happened at all.

But that’s the staggering turn on the dime. However fleeting and sharp my hubris stabs, I am not unhappy. I’m happy for you, and for me. I loved you so, so inhumanly much. And seeing you now, away, makes me happier still. Because this is everything I would never have been able to give you. This is everything you were denying yourself, being with me. This is you in your element. And we spent utterly glorious years together. You gave me so much, you made me so much more than I was, and you stood by as I became even more. And you deprived yourself, and the world and circumstances deprived you of so much. And you don’t have it now- but you’re getting there. And more than anything, I am overwhelmingly happy for you, and for whoever else you decide you want on that journey next to you- however passingly.

Am I not jealous? I am. She’s had her hands on you. She’s had you in ways no one except I did. Every inch of our bodies was hallowed ground for the other, pure and saved from the sullying touch of any passing fancy. And now she has her lips where I put mine. She has your hands holding her the way you held me. And when you’re in her, her soul isn’t crying in the delirious ecstasy of a woman being loved in every plane of being. She’s taking all the parts of you that belonged to me, and not treating them with enough reverence.

For me. For you, it’s enough. This is enough. This is what you want. Because you don’t belong to me. And that is why it doesn’t hurt me anymore. Because you belong to yourself now, to revere and desecrate as you please. And I belong to me now. And what did, and what we shared, belongs to both of us. In memory.

My love. My sweetest, dearest friend. I will always feel too much and write too much and cry too much, and be much too strong than I should be. But there is the great distance now that I will never love you too much again. I will always love you, and celebrate you, and revel in our having been. And you are welcome to visit our home, as I often do, in the late hours of the night, in maudlin and in memory. My arms will always hold a home for your heart. But of a different sort now. I love you. And I’m still walking.

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Ugly With Colors

No, no!

Don’t look at my face!

Here, see what I forgave you for, instead!

Don’t, don’t do that

-don’t look into my eyes 

It’s just something I threw on

Oh, it’s just a good light

Yes, last night was wonderful

You fell asleep on me, but hey-

At least you had fun!

That’s what matters, right?

It’s okay, these things happen

What’s that, you need space?

Oh yes, I’d love to shop for your boss

It’s just a few miles out of my way

Haha, yes, you’re just friendly

I understand perfectly if

you want to gift her lingerie

Sure, I need no guarantees 

I’m not going anywhere 

So kind, I know, so sweet, I know

I put everyone at ease

Because ‘ugly girls have good 

personalities’

Paper bags for our heads, 

from the groceries 

covering the lease

Ignoring the intent 

Constant appeasement

-Compensation, remuneration

Is what we deal in, instead of 

Affection

That’s the only trade we know

So that’s the commerce we expect

-and know of no other. 

You can see black and white

when you’re taught that

You’re ugly in color 

© CM

24.03.2017

Ugly With Colors. 
It’s not the first time I’ve heard this ‘ugly girls have good personalities’ thing, but doesn’t make it any less painful. 

Or, as my father puts it, at least you have no reason to waste time in front of a mirror. 
Maybe. Or maybe that’s because that’s not the reflection that matters to me. 

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Letters To No One

Dear Spence,

I’ve been meaning to talk to you for a while. Only it’s been twelve years and I don’t know where you are, anymore. The last time I looked for you, I saw that you’d done a live performance at a bar near your house that got a huge turn out and blitzed everywhere on Facebook. That made me so happy. That you were still pursuing your dream. Some dreams shouldn’t ever die.

 

Things have been strange for me. Recently my boyfriend got very drunk and said a lot of things, hurtful things, that have made me think, nonetheless. One of those things is that I’m an ’emotion hag’. I’m not sure if you know what one of those is. It’s like fag-hag, a gay man’s female best friend, only according to him, my area of expertise is people who want to talk about their emotions, not gay men.

 

And he meant it in an insulting way, because he was drunk and hurting and trying to be as hurtful to me as he could. It’s just one of the things he said, and one of the things that stayed with me, but I’m not sure it’s a bad thing at all. I tried explaining to him when he was sober that he’s right, it is a pattern of my behavior. I do ‘listen’ too much, and let people vent to me, but that’s because that’s all I can do for them. These are people who are hurting, and the least I can do is to listen to them. I don’t have the finances to help them and I don’t have any way of changing their situation- Hell, I can’t even change my own. All I can do is listen, give them someone to bounce thoughts off, so I do that. It makes him uncomfortable because he doesn’t like my ‘range of emotion’, or at least, the amount of emotion I fluctuate through on a daily basis. It’s not that he doesn’t feel the same. He does, he just doesn’t believe in acknowledging it.

He likes to think he’s above such base human tendencies such as feeling. Only he refuses to see, and I’d never point it out, but every time he gets that drunk, he does just the same thing we all do. We feel. We let ourselves feel.
I thought of you that day. It was not the first time I’d seen an angry drunk, but the frustration, the desperation to lash out at someone, to see them hurt the same way he was hurting… It made me think of you. You got just as furious every Friday, when you could drink without having to worry about work the next day. The odd beers in the week days would just leave you dour, and sometimes surly, but never full blown bitter. That was reserved for weekends, when you could drink yourself blind and blame me for being sixteen when you were forty already. For being young when you weren’t anymore, for having a future when you hated your job, for being smart, and for not moving to UK to be with you, or for having guy friends were closer to my age.

I think a lot of that went over my head at the time. I was just a girl, even though I won’t deny I was perceptive even for my age. But that only helped me handle your bad moods. It didn’t help me understand them, or understand that that the relationship was fundamentally wrong. I was not your muse. That sounds a little silly, said out loud. I was not your partner or your lover. I was a damaged young girl who was unbelievably grateful for even having anyone around me who said they loved me, or gave me any respect. Because what you gave me was not respect by anyone else’s standards, but compared to what I got from the ‘real’ people in my life, it was still one of the best things to be happening to me.

 

I got scared, though. Over time, I couldn’t keep blaming the beer believably enough, and I couldn’t justify your resentment of my not being there with you. And somewhere during that period I started growing a spine in secret. Still battered emotionally and physically, but a spine nonetheless. And I’m sorry. The entire situation had veered off from being a place of comfort to a place where more hurt stemmed from. I was an adult at sixteen, like I was an adult at twelve, but even adults are slow to learn their lessons sometimes. And I was afraid of you, you gave me reason to be. I should have been more afraid of you, in retrospect. But I knew then as I know now, you were never a bad man. You are a good man. You were just troubled. And a sixteen year old girl an ocean away was not the answer to anything. Except more pain. And I regret causing you that pain.

I heard the recordings of your live performance. You still brush the hair off your forehead exactly the same way. And you still smoke incessantly. Although I can’t look at you scoldingly for that anymore, given that I’ve started smoking too ( I know, right? Who would’ve thought?) And you smile more fully. And no matter what happened between us, it is so heartwarmingly, gloriously wonderful to see you smile that way.

 

One day, I will too.

 

 

 

Your friend,
Cookie

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Pathological Hope

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I suffer
From pathological Hope
Disappointments are bad enough, but
What makes them even tougher to cope
With, is
This nagging uncertainty
Wishful thinking, or just stupidity
That there might, there might just be
Something better for me

I suffer
Because I can’t stop believing
And I may be stubborn, but
Life, is unrelenting
I try not to, but
I keep bending
People crush me, and walk away
And I raise my head yet again
Too hopeful to accept that
There are no fucking happy endings.

(c)CM
26.11.2016

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Greenstick Fractures

Greenstick Fractures

Days after the apology
Mornings of the aftermath
The sky isn’t really blue yet
The pillows still suffer my wrath,
No, I’m not yet okay
And I don’t know why it’s so
Difficult to wash with a thousand ‘sorry’s
The blood off a bruised ego
Bared in the light of day
My vision blurs, at the oddest times
The world is gray, semi permanently
You riddled holes through which colors leached away
Even your smile doesn’t stand out to me

I don’t know, maybe I can’t see
Maybe I don’t want to see

Let’s count this one as a lesson learnt
Even love needs some time to fill fury’s cracks
Pride does not suffer greenstick fractures
Spines can bend till they break, and not always
Grow back
No amount of alcohol can atone for
A drunken night’s sins
Even angry words are more potent when laced
With whiskey
You’re hung over, and I’m struggling to re paint my sunrises
Rather ineffectively
And I can’t
-you need to hold the brush
Because these are colors
You have to give back to me

©CM
13.11.2016

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Stones

We created a stone, you and I
Buried deep within me
Fed it from my blood, nurtured it
with your caring
Day by day, we willed it to bloom
In hopes of harvesting happiness
From its cold surface
We thought that I
Was birthing a world
Just hiding in my shadow

But we created a stone
And it was lifeless
Shouldn’t we have known that
It would never grow?

(c)CM
05.10.2016

Ps. I have a new About Me page, guys! Let me know what you think! 😀

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Elegy

Elegy

 

 

 

So this is how great loves die
That which promised to surpass dynasties
To outlive generations
That clung on through wars
Endured the vagaries of
Cobwebbed memory
Which fought for survival
Kept beating by force of sheer will
Which slept through a moment of weakness
And a mouthful of sleeping pills
And awoke two days later, retching and wretched
But still pregnant with a spark of hope, still ..

This is how great loves die
Alone, desperate, in need
Of a fragment of consolation
Because they bared their soft throat to
The cutting edges of greed, they die
Under their lover’s murmured encouragement, they lie, and bleed
Stripped of their one last delusion
So this is how great loves die, discarded
At the altars of success, and ambition

 

 

 

©CM
13.09.2016

 

 

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What I Did Today

choose

 

 

 

Do you want to know what I did today?

 

I came back home and I cleaned my room. Twice. Because I wanted to cry, and big girls don’t cry. So I cleaned my room.

I removed the mountain of washed clothes that had accumulated in the corner. All the dresses I’d bought in recent times, to wear for you. The stockings and leggings to go with them. The light jackets I’d been wearing on our outdoors dates because I knew you didn’t give two shits about my scars, but I still didn’t want people staring at us in public. It took a while, folding and putting everything away, memories and funny incidents still strung on to each and every of those dresses. But I’m not going to be wearing any of those for any of the reasons I wore them for… best to put them away now.

 

It felt like a funeral, like a burial of every happy color in my life. And I was tempted to cry, but I didn’t. Not even when I packed away my lingerie drawer, full of absurd scraps of lace that I’d only bought at all because you’d mentioned offhandly that you ‘like that shit’. And I knew exactly how much you liked each and every surprise from that drawer. But there’s no need for intimates where intimacy doesn’t exist. So I packed them up and put them away. It’s almost funny how many days we spent wrapped around those bits of cloth. Then again, when the fabric of reality itself changes, what possible strength can silk or satin have?

 

So I put them away, too.

 

And then I packed it all up, twice. Because you’re not gone yet, but you’re going to go very soon. And I have no use for these trappings of fantasies that are already evaporating. There’s so many things that are going to cease to be real for me, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts. Moving my bed to a different corner isn’t going to erase the love and the pain I’ve painted these walls with, and when it’s night and there’s nothing but darkness, those colors will show and I’m going to cry. I’m going to be crying for many, many nights. But I’m still going to have to get up and face a hundred people every day, smiling and laughing and doing whatever normal people do.

 

Because you and I were sitting at a bar today, drinking beer and listening to random music blaring- nothing we haven’t done a thousand times before, but something we probably won’t be doing again. And we were holding hands and Fergie was singing that it’s time to be a big girl now.

 

And big girls don’t cry.