Eternal Temptation

❥ 39| a child's fear

⚠️ TRIGGER WARNING: dark themes such as sexual abuse, child abuse and kidnapping. Please read with caution and only if you feel comfortable with it.

SOMETIMES, THERE WERE DAYS in your life that you never wanted to forget. You wanted to permanently etch them into your memory so you could open them back and marvel at how they brought you such immense joy or an emotion that you wanted to feel over and over again. You wanted it to play on loop, never wanting the perfect moment to end.

It's said that whenever you reflect on a memory, you don't actually remember what you felt during that event but instead what felt the last time you reminisced it. Memories change and adapt to fit you as you change and wander through life. It could even begin to make you recall memories in a light that they were never originally in.

Memories were almost like a bunch of dominoes in that regard. The last memory you have of the memory affects its essence — its core — and tips the next over, creating a chain of consistent change.

But gradually, you begin to forget memories. They become faint and barely a whisper from your past. You even lose your determination to keep them permanently etched into your brain as it withers away slowly with the memory. Almost like when the dominoes reach the end of the chain, when it knows that it has nothing else left to tip over. Your brain picks the memory up and tosses it, trying to make room for newer memories, throwing away the ones that you treasure more often than not.

But sometimes, you had days that were nightmares wrapped in the disguise of being just another day. They left you with memories and scars that gave you tortured you whenever you shut your eyes. You wanted nothing more than to simply just forget, but your brain — being the torturous, heartless organ that it was — never seemed to realise that. It reminded you of those memories over and over again, becoming sadistic, never easing its deadly clutch on you and never becoming less painful.

It becomes forever engrained in each second, in each breath, in each waking moment. It simply begins to sum up the purpose of your entire life. It begins to define you. Like it did with me. My life revolved around that nightmare, and each time my brain tortured me with the memory once again, the need for vengeance grew in each cell of my body. Vengeance for myself. Vengeance for Rafiq. Vengeance for every single person out there who suffered and continued to suffer after they were stripped of any sense of normality, left to live a nightmare. Because as nice as wealth and extravagance seemed, once you met your fate, you begin to simply just yearn for a normal life. One without bloodshed, one without the bloodcurdling screams that woke you up at night, one with peace. Peace from the outside world. Peace from the voices screaming at you. Peace from yourself.

As much as I hated recalling that specific memory, I was done with keeping it away from someone who'd grown to mean so much to me in so little time. She was family, and I hated keeping secrets away from them. It was unfair of me to probe about her past and her troubles when I didn't return the sentiment. But more than anything, I wanted her to see what was behind all the layers. I wanted to show her my raw truth and I wanted her to stay after seeing all of that. Maybe it was selfish to wish for, but I wanted her to see all of me — all of my demons — and still stay. I didn't want her to stay with a lie, a man who was a husband in name and a stranger in reality. We both deserved that much.