silence is too loud

Abandonment and neglect are masters at disguise. That’s because when you’re running for your life, you don’t think to yourself — “oh, right now I could be spending time with people who uplift me or receiving a hug or doing something that really interests me.” You just fucking run.. for.. your.. life. If you survive, you won’t know what you missed until you are met with situations that require something of you that isn’t quite there. The lack of something is how you come to truly understand that when people run for their lives, they do not possess the capacity to do anything else until there’s only safety. They are simply focused on surviving. You don’t know what you don’t know. Until you are faced with what you don’t know yet everyone around you seems to be doing fine with. You feel the deficit then. That’s when you come to know the abandonment in a different way. Before, it was just the “way things were.” Later, that takes on a new meaning as you realize that the lack of something beneficial happening is just as bad as if something bad had happened.

And what if both happened? What if the bad things happened and the lack of good things as well? What if the silence was both the comfort and the pain? Just at different times. How do you know when to feel the comfort and when to allow the pain?

This moment will pass. Just like thousands more. You’ll have no part in it. You won’t even have left a breeze here. There’s nothing to hold on to. No anchor you left me. No words to remember. How do you feel about missing yet another moment? I wonder how it was for you when each moment came and went. Is this why you insert yourself in everything I say? In every step I take? Because it can’t be my moment. Just one moment. Just for me. I can’t take this barrage of “I would…” anymore. Just the thought of it makes me want to throw things against the wall. That’s the most recent urge when I think of you – throwing things against the wall. I wonder and wonder how everything lines up in your mind. How it all seems to make sense to you. And how the sense you make of it in your head just pushes me farther away. Don’t you notice anything? It makes zero sense to me. It pains me to even think that this is okay for you. It didn’t start like this, though. We didn’t start here. This began 36 years ago. Why can’t any of you see that?

I forgot to not breathe. To not exist. I forgot to make you comfortable. To succumb to every word and utter. I forgot that you were the monster all along. The story you tell yourself – how does it end? I can’t even imagine how you envision it to be. I imagine you’ve watered these lies so many times, you’ve forgotten what’s grown is hideous.

Where did you go?

I don’t know, somewhere different. It has to feel different than this. This can’t be it.

A constant fire I’ve been putting out.

While trying to live. Trying to breathe. Trying to learn. Trying to love.

Trying to get you to look my way.

Aren’t you tired? Of always setting the fire? Of trying to burn my life, my breath, my mind, my love?

Aren’t you tired of never looking my way?

I always wondered if the cost of your silence was too high for you. Because you… You paid it with our relationship.