Is it healing or destruction?
It’s about one of those times when the chilly weather that you waited so long for brings you the gift of sadness, for the time that’s gone, for the ones you’ve lost, for the pieces of you that you tried to gather and make a picture out of them, only to realise that there’s so much to miss, and so much missing.
While trying to reconstruct myself and to distance myself from everything i’ve been through, the summers that left so many scars on my chest, I’ve realised that the more i ran to make up for the version of me that i lost, the more I’ve been falling down in a pit with no end, no ground to fall on, no place to reach at, nothing to hold onto.
There’s this hollowness that screams once in a while and calls upon me with so much strength that I lose all my will to not listen to it. The voice that is full of pain, whining and scratching through the walls of a place that i cannot find within me to reach it, to sit beside it. All i can do is to hear it and question, “Will it stop when I die?”
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Then I see myself walking around, searching for the meaning behind my suffering and all i find is this silence walking away from me. I try hard to chase it every day but all that I’m left with is the blood in my throat, as if holding onto that suffocation has dried so much within me.
Then I took a deep breath, to let everything loose, as if I had decided to let myself choose… between something that I can build, with what I can be filled; to not let the hollowness define me, to not let the despair find me.
Though I would be scared while sitting in the dark, it would be better to call that hour — a time I can lean on, the time that is mine, a time that can bring me someone who is fine.
Fiercely running, the person who is always trying to keep up with everything but lately I have been seeing her losing that strength and she has been questioning whether it’s something that she wants to be remembered for, whether it’s something that she wants to remember from this time. Whether it's the meaning she had been asking for, whether this would explain what she's been losing.
Then comes the performance of trying to be. The noises, the smells, the vivid eyes of the people she lost, that brutal summer that left nothing of her at all. She tried to come up for air while drowning, and she tried so many times, but the more she wrote, the more voices called out, “Is this what you fear?” While trying to separate what she was trying to protect from what she cared about, the more she would rush to solve, yet again, something else.
Is this about rebuilding yourself or breaking down what was all yours? Is this about trying to mend what’s left or erase something you once had? Is this about what you care for or about what you hate to lose?
Is this another exchange for the pain that you’ve endured with the pain that comes next? Is this the chapter where you know you’ve lost years to survival, and when you can finally get out, life tears down the chapter? Is this what you call breaking the chains that explained your existence, or is it about forgetting what you once called, “this is who I was”
— still unfolding, Alaine.
