Tag Archives: pain

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Why I Was Consumed Then

You say you loved me the best you could have.

I believe you.

I accept that.

I am grateful.

But there is no denying

the simple truth.

I was unfulfilled.

I was unhappy.

I was suffocating.

I was stifling.

Trying to love you

In the way you loved me

I realize the difference now

Now that I can finally

Breathe.

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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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Silk

I don’t remember the last time someone used that word for me. Pure. It seems almost antiquated. But what drove it through like an icicle to the chest, was the thought behind it. That someone in this day and age still believed that I was capable of innocence. When I spend day in, day out, convinced of my disillusionment and jadedness. That someone could even think that I was deserving of the word.

Now there’s a novel idea. One that struck me almost into believing. Maybe, in the recesses of reality, I’ll allow myself to. Dreams are, after all, spilling out the seams….

Love,

Cookie

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Strychnine

Forgetting, did not render it benign

We were destruction, but-

you were mine … .

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.

Whatever that means.

Love is an opthistotonic contracture. The death mask grimace, the arched back, frozen in flexion. The limbs jarred against the chest, the legs askew. The poison circulated well beyond the point of return. Or, at least, you recover with enough supportive treatment, and maybe enough time, but you never get it out of your system completely. The spasms visit you at the oddest hours of the night. A lone, unguarded moment here and there, and it catches you unawares. And it hits, like a lightning bolt to your spine, electricity and pain landing down your entirely. And all you can do is wait for it to pass.

Sometimes you forget that you were ill. The dormancy of the hurt lulls you into a false sense of security. And you forget. Or you remember, but you force yourself into hoping that it’s gone. That it was benign.

But it is destruction. It was destruction. And you were mine.

And the two were not mutually exclusive.

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Cilice

I wear my unhappinesses on my sleeve

Carefully rolled up and tucked away

Never farther than two fingers’ reach

I work, with my laughter elbow deep,

Cuffs stained with streaks of artifice

While I prevaricate- wherefrom do I secede?

As the painfully cultivated illusions recede-

I pluck my hems unconsciously

Too nervous to confess or deceive

So I hide it all, in plain sight

I wear my unhappiness on my sleeve

I save my lonelinesses for the night

Where I can, uninterrupted, keep sole company

Judge, witness, lawyer, mob, and jury

Pass my own sentences, give verdict

Justify and deny with equal practice

I weigh the twilight of dawn against dusk

Somewhere, in betwixt, sleep visits us

And all the hopes gentle pass into the void

-the cold warmth of pillow on pillow, on my side

Subterfuge borne of necessity

-but an expedient ploy

So I save my lonelinesses, for the night

And mornings come fraught

with anticipation, overwrought

with promises, potential, all these glorious things

hovering just out of reach,

but not out of thought

All these fallacies and fantasies

That I am capable of – but I’m not

I need my sorrow like monks their cilices

A reminder to self, even when not displayed

Even when rolled up and tucked neat away

I work with my laughter, loud and elbow deep

But never farther than two fingers’ reach

I wear my unhappinesses on my sleeve

.

.

.

Cilice

©️Yusra

06.09.2018

⚫️♥️⚫️

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Of Gods and Men III

I was talking to a friend yesterday, about the problem with the notion of love.

Specifically, how being cynical robs you of the so-called ‘honeymoon period’. You never have the initial few weeks where you see the other with rose tinted glasses. Where all their eccentricities are still cute and endearing, rather than being nails-on-a-chalkboard intolerable. Cynicism and a healthy wariness of love never lets you experience the euphoria that brings.

At the same time, it seems as though it’d be a distinct advantage to going into something with your eyes wide open. Fear and vulnerabilities aside, maybe starting with a rational acknowledgment and acceptance of imperfections would be a better foundation weather the inevitable storms.

Maybe it’s just the pragmatism of surrender speaking, having been utterly defeated by that one and only attempt at loving madly that I could muster. Rationale makes for a sturdy excuse.

Or maybe, this is what my version of hope is going to be. But I’m finding- loving smart is so much more difficult than loving hard.

Here’s to falling, one way or the other, and hopefully flying.

Love and light,

Cookie ❤

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I Can’t See.

It’s strange, to look at yourself in a mirror, and not know what you look like.

I’d like to think that I understand. Of all days, of all times, now when I know better, when I’m better. But I wonder, if there’s some things you never know about yourself. Ever. If you spend your life burning through your time, trying to get where you’ll be ready, for understanding or realization. And it never happens- does it ever happen? Do we ever simply open our eyes one day, and just know?

Will I?

I go days without looking at myself closely in the mirror. These are the same days that I sit in front of my old fashioned dresser and comb my hair for minutes together. It’s hip length, and tangles easy, so I used a fine toothed comb. Always over the left shoulder, and then half that time over the right, to get that one fluffy spot I can’t reach otherwise. It shines when I comb it. I take care of it.

I use three different lotions, for my face, body, and hands. I moisturize every morning and night, and always put lotion on my skin while watching a movie on Sundays. I try not to think of Silence of the Lambs when I do that. I always end up doing exactly that. The same, repetitive, calming motions every night. I stand in front of the mirror and moisturize my face, before I leave my ponytail loose, strip in front of the mirror, and get into bed.

I have three mirrors in my room.

And I have no fucking idea, what I look like.

I want to know. I fucking want, to fucking know, what I fucking look like. I’ve spent the first half of my life convinced that I was ugly, because that’s what I was taught, so earnestly, so utterly without a lack of certainty that I was ugly, ugly, ugly, that I’d never be loved. My version of rebellion was shouting at myself inside my head that I wasn’t. I wasn’t ugly, even if I wasn’t beautiful, and I was good enough. I wasn’t, I wasn’t, I wasn’t ugly. I told myself enough times to make up for every time that I was told the other.

And then I outgrew both. Those sets of understandings, of different halves of my lives. Because people came into my life who convinced me that I was both. That I was one, because I was the other. I was beautiful, because I was ugly. I was a good girl, I’m a good girl, because I can’t afford not to be. _She’s not pretty but she’s so nice!_ _I fell for you because you were sweeter than the other girls I knew. I thought that’d be enough. I’m sorry, I thought it’d be._ _My friend thinks I can do better. So I told him how intelligent you are_. _I Love you. I just can’t be with you. It’s just how things are._

And I don’t fucking blame you, any of you. Who didn’t see me any more clearly than I ever did. I don’t blame you because I don’t care anymore. You didn’t. You cared about your conveniences and your images and not about what it’d leave me with, when you trampled through my self image with your big muddy feet and out the same way. I didn’t know where I was going before, but I’m still more lost now.

I have no reason to be, now more than ever. I’m the closest to my ideal size I’ve ever been, have a good job, and a life ahead of me, with the chance to finally close a chapter of horrors I’d given up on leaving behind. But I’ve been so engrossed with eyeing what I want to escape, and that that walked away from me, that I never stopped to realize I had no idea who I was walking with. The face in the mirror that I wash with water, cleanse with Neutrogena, and pat dry, not rub, is a stranger, a stranger I can’t objectively decide is beautiful or ugly or completely nondescript, nothing at all. You’re too familiar for me to judge you one way or the other. You’re too alien to me for me to accept you, one way or the other. Who even are you? And when people call you beautiful, or ugly, or simply let their glances slide off your face… which one of them is lying? Do you even know?

Can you even know?

Why did you spend so much time working on your scars? You spent so much time on your arms to make up for cutting them open, hugging the scars close to compensate for making them, and then learning to love them, and all the time, you forgot to pay attention to your eyes, or your nose, or your lips, or anything people look at you, when they look at you. If they look at you.

Who the fuck are you?

Who are you?