Clandestine Confessions

March 2021 – a glimpse into my hidden truth. The “lost months” I will now refer to them as.
–
I laid in bed for days – despondent. Depressed. Discarded.
Only vacating the confines of my home for the morning coffee outing made mandatory by a friend.
“The world needs you in it. Even if just for five minutes,” I was told.
But could the world even see me?
I was a ghost of myself.
Did I give all of me away? Or was I erased?
The how I still question daily.
With coffee attained, the only company I would keep, back into seclusion I would go.
Immersed in a deafening silence of identity.
While simultaneously succumb to the shouting of a traumatized mind.
Music incessantly playing in a futile effort to drown out the thoughts.
Every song bringing me back to a life once lived. A memory from a chapter I never thought would see an end.
An ending that lead to contemplation of my own….
–
A knock on the door grabbed my attention.
“Let’s get some food in you.”
I looked out my window to see the sun had set.
Pain is a robber of time.
I grabbed my phone – 8PM it showed me. Along with twelve unread texts. Two missed calls. Fifteen emails.
Life was moving on. But I was trapped in my yesterdays. Right where he left me.
–
“I can make your oatmeal for you.”
It had been three and a half months since our end in December. He didn’t have to still care. Yet he did.
A little late but yet somehow right on time.
Proof that at one point my heart knew what it was doing.
He did not fire the gun but still showed up to clean the wounds.
Every day.
Until my laughter returned.
“I’m okay. I can do it,” words muttered in a whisper with my head down and hood up.
Control – my mind demanded it.
Food – the only way I knew to possess it.
–
He lifted up my chin, looked into my eyes.
It was the first time in weeks I let someone see into me – a consequence of the privilege I gave very few being abused.
“Where did you go?” A question laced with fear yet his voice still steady.
We were not perfect, not in the least, but we did balance each other out. My emotions to his logic.
“I thought home,” I choke on those three words. So difficult to say, even harder to admit.
How did I get it so wrong? Was I that far gone I no longer knew the voice of truth?
The confusion plagued my mind the most.
I say that in past tense but who am I kidding? It still does…
–
“I think you should move to Pennsylvania. You have people -”
“No.”
It came out harshly, loudly, abruptly. Before he could even finish the sentence. My heart’s reflex to the mention of that place.
Little did he know that was the reason I was like this.
“That is not where I belong.”
Although mere weeks before I was scheduling myself to visit apartments, go to open houses…
How quickly life changes when it is driven by emotions.
–
He wiped away the one tear that was slowly falling.
“Need my shirt?” he joked.
My mind went back to the first time my tears soaked his sleeve; that December night I knew I loved him – laying on his bed as he sang a Bryan Adams song to me. And then it just became my comfort every time after.
A symbol of simplicity in the most emotionally complicated moments.
I let out a little laugh.
And then used my own sleeve.
At some point I had to let go.
At some point I had to be my own hero.
–
And that I would become.
Day by day. Choice by choice. Emotion by emotion.
The stretches between breakdowns became longer.
The periods of peace became extended.
The darkness became brighter in the light of truth and love.
The pieces of myself once forgotten remembered with every flash of joy that hit my soul.
Slowly but surely putting me back together.
To be here. Today. Writing this in wholeness.
The purpose in the pain…