Let me start off by saying: this isn’t about you. It isn’t for you. It’s for me. It’s about me. It’s because sometimes I have to scream things to be heard when a whisper would do.
So no, this isn’t for you.
Sometimes I wish I understood why people do what they do. I pretend like I know, or at least I make enough assumptions to fuel my suppositions. It isn’t right or wrong, it just is. I wish I didn’t try to understand why people do what they do, and yet here I am — saying and thinking it, when I know you do too.
I wish it were easier to be heard. I think though for most of us, we’re living with headphones on. At least, I am. I can’t block anything out unless I get rid of one of my senses. Sometimes yeah, that means my common sense. But I live with my headphones on or nearby so I can dampen the noise. There’s so much of it these days.
The noise, that is.
This isn’t for you, trying to tell you how I feel. I think to you, sometimes, feelings aren’t real. They’re inaccessible and they’re stored in a place where you leave them in the dark to rot and mold and fester and stink. Emotions and feelings do grow old, but they don’t ever expire in the way food might. They grow mold and rot, morphing into something unrecognizable before they start to become something else: garbage.
They do not age well.
This isn’t about you. It’s about how I feel like I can’t tell you how I feel because when I do, it’s unraveling. I take off my clothes — bare skin — and show you barely healed scars and you don’t see it because you see all of me instead. Sometimes I want you to see those scars and realize they’re freshly healed… so words with sharp edges remove the fresh skin and suddenly they’re bare once again. Bare wounds bleed. Your touch, if gentle and slow, would make them feel better. But you’re screaming too, when a whisper would do.
Sometimes you’re a blood letter right now, not a heart better.
I’m not asking for you to say anything. I don’t like apologies, seldom do they feel sincere enough to matter as much as gossamer lips on broken skin feel gracious enough to heal hurt. Words can be sharper than glass edges and they can cut deeper than dull knives. Words both end and mend lives.
I try to mind what I say and what I do, especially with you. Standing bare by you, hands open and offering vulnerability — I’m met with eyes shut and arms crossed. I want to offer you all, I really do. But sometimes love and fear are beasts in battle, and I don’t always have an idea of who is winning. I think they take turns, I just hate seeing you as the beast instead of the beauty.
But this isn’t about you. This is about how I have to talk to myself to be heard. Maybe I need to hear myself, it isn’t for anyone else anyway. I don’t need anyone else to hear me — that’s not true, we all do — especially when I don’t listen to myself. Part of me does, sometimes. Part of me is connected, sometimes. Otherwise, I’m lost in the woods, dropping bits of bread to hopefully find a way back to myself. Otherwise, I’m lost in a sea of myself even when I offer my hand to ask for help to be pulled out of the water. Maybe I’m not asking loud enough, or maybe I’m screaming and the water is drowning my words. I’m terrified of drowning, but I can feel the pressure in my lungs every so now and again when it’s hard to swim.
This isn’t about you. Maybe it isn’t even about me, too.
Because loneliness aches like the deep cracks in the earth after quakes. Deep and undulating, reverberating and leaving you with tremors, seemingly ever after. How can you ease loneliness when you’re not even listening to yourself? Maybe I don’t trust myself enough to believe what I say to myself, so a whisper becomes a scream.
Maybe you know what I mean.
This isn’t about you — yeah, I’m getting sick of saying it, too.
I’m trying to tell myself that it’s about what I need to say. What I need to be heard, for. That it’s about allowing everyone to exist in their own right. But when you fall asleep and I’m alone at night, more often than not do I want to give up that fight. Why scream when a whisper would do?
If only you could hear that, too. But this isn’t about you, it’s about finding a way to say what I need to without needing anyone to hear me but myself. I find there are more and more stories I need to tell when my mind is a living hell, little fires everywhere. Sometimes they merge, creating a bigger, more chaotic flame. Sometimes they burn a bit and fizzle out, charcoal pieces left everywhere after. Embers burning a bit, here and there, until rain takes out the fire’s flare.
This isn’t about you.
This isn’t about you.
This isn’t about you.
If only you knew how much I wish that were true.
