6.9.13: Happy One Year Anniversary
The night of June 9th. One year has passed by me, passed through me, attracting scrap metal to weigh the journey down, shackle the survival down, and to slice the pieces even further. Three hundred sixty five unwanted unwelcomed days of you passed through me. Three hundred sixty five nights of terrors that shake me from my sleep, first, when the only sound that bounces into an echo between the inside walls of my skull is that of your targeted screaming and rage and of my crying pleas and, second, when all that projects off of the insides of my closed eyelids are your own eyes burning into me, staring into me, burying a reaching arm into my throat and uprooting the veins, valves, and ventricles of what is left of the heart you molded, rotted, left out in the sun to burn. Not a one of those days has gone by without you appearing in one way or another. Words cannot describe what I would give to remove your entries, what I would do, what I think of doing every day, what my scars prove of my past fantasies of removing my ability to think of you, provide a pained distraction. What I would do. What I could do. What I do. One year. And many nonbelievers to challenge my survival.
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To the many, to the anons, to the phantoms, to those whom believed that my grieving, my words, came from an abandoned heart missing their neighboring half, to those whom gained satisfaction from further battering and blaming the battered:
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It wasn’t the breakup. It wasn’t the other woman. It was everything before (and soon I learned, everything after), everything that forced me to stay, forced me to love her. It was the threat of suicide if I left. It was the punching of walls. It was the deep clawing of skin. It was being held hostage in her two day old speeding car as I begged to go home, only to receive screams and “fuck you, I’m not driving you home. You can walk” and fist punches to the steering wheel. It was finding her in the kitchen with a knife, and twirling it on her forearm, daring me to leave. It was the honeymoon periods and that I’m sorry I’ll never do it again. It was the marriage proposals and the forevers. And then followed by the only-until-graduations. It was the contradiction. It was the confusion. It was the eggshell walking. It was the insistence that I didn’t communicate, when I knew honest communication was dangerous. It was the compromising, the insistence that I didn’t compromise. It was the blindness, my own, to the compromise. It was the compromise of skin, sanity, and soul. It was the sacrifice of skin, sanity, soul. It was the manipulation. It was the lies. It was the forced breaking of a self to obey another. It was in the supposed name of “love.”
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Listen, my breakup choice was one never regretted. It was one life-saving. The grief stays away from settling over the end of the relationship. It lays itself in the relationship’s primary existence.
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Continue to batter, to blame. Nonbeliever, resisting-believer, skeptics and predator-protectors, you won’t provide me with any more abuse than my 23 years have faced. You won’t be the one to break me. Especially not after surviving the most difficult year (and, really, more) of my life. You won’t be the straw that breaks this back.