The Things I Leave Unsaid

71. My Body is a War Zone

A/n: I hope you read the a/n I posted about a half hour ago, but if you didn't😢 I'm starting a new poetry book. This one's really long and I probably should've started one forever ago but never did because I didn't think of it. Oops.

Please go back and read that after this and also after watching the video to the side on this chapter(it's wonderful, definitely watch!) if you didn't before. I put a lot of love into it for all you beautiful souls. You and these poems are my entire world right now. Be proud❤️

My body is a war zone. 

It's like if someone slit a shallow cut into your arm, but you had fallen asleep in a weird position that was comfortable at the time and your whole body had gone completely numb from how long it'd been since it's had blood circulating through it regularly. Then say another person did the same on the other arm, and another on your leg, and another, your stomach. Say they laughed as they did it too. You wouldn't be able to feel them all slicing you up bit by bit, not at all really.

You wouldn't have moved from the position causing your body to be numb because you don't like that icy pinprick feeling it brings before the relief and normalcy come back again. So you lay there a little bit longer. And say you're still sleepy-like as if in a dream and have barely even noticed the lack of touching sense at all. Unconsciously maybe you see, but your conscious mind tells you nothing is wrong and keeps you in that defensive blanket of various dreamworlds, cloaked in ignorance and false enlightenment.

Your body thinks it's to keep you safe but doesn't take into consideration how sooner or later, your limbs are going to need that blood flow or die without it. But just a little bit longer won't hurt..

So then eventually...eventually if you wake enough and sit up and stop pretending you can sleep for the rest of your life, and it shocks you, realizing how numb you've been. You sort of notice it at first but not really. Say this has never happened to you before, this numb thing. You'd think it was good, wouldn't you? You could watch all these people line up to cut you open and calmly watch the blood spill out the jagged cuts in between layers of surface skin, and you could stoke their hair as they do it, whispering how wonderful they are to boost their self image all while they cut yours down to dust. But it doesn't pain you so there is no damage...right? Right?

Wrong.

You start to wake, to stand, to breathe deeper again, and give in to the pinpricks, being told they'll lead to better feelings and healing.

But then the process doesn't work. It's not the pinpricks' fault though; it's yours and you had no idea. The scars you let people weave into you like a patchwork quilt of dishonesty and unconscious deception, they now all at once are blinding you with the pain of them all and you have no idea how you never realized why it didn't hurt before.

Of course it didn't hurt before; you had not a sensation of any kind left in your body. You could do just about anything and it wouldn't harm you in that moment. You were invincible.

And so then because it made you feel good, you'd carve the same shallow but still bloody cuts into the people next to you, those you love dearly, trying to give them a little scrappy piece of your "happiness" to treasure themselves. But they shock you, crying out and squirming away, and this makes you angry because you honestly can't see the issue.

They only think it hurts. It's all in their heads, you tell them.

And because they love you, they try to believe in your words but they AREN'T numb and then they end up thinking something is wrong with them when you show them all your relatively painless scars and they can't do the same without agony being inflicted.

You think something is wrong with them too and you mistakenly voice it aloud. You aren't being insensitive, you reason with the underbelly of guilt weighing you down. You're only telling her the truth, for God's sake, doesn't she deserve to know the truth!

And then when the numbness finally wears off, you realize all that you've done and all the pain you've unintentionally inflicted upon those you hold dearest to your heart and it breaks you. It breaks everything. You heart. Your will. Your trust. Your soul.

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Because how can people live with themselves after doing what they'd promised they never would do? Aka turning into their elders and going against everything they'd ever once believed in.
How can they ever trust anyone again, like the happy people say they must in order to fix themselves, when they can't even trust their own judgement?

It's so confusing to be alive right now.

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I was a blind man teaching fine arts; a deaf child leading an amateur orchestra; a paraplegic calling himself a great master of intricate ballet dance. I was all of these and more, and I'm too terrified to open my eyes or ears or stand like a man, to own up to all the damage I've done.

Now I place tiny cuts in my palm in secret, every one of them a brand new shock of life that I've never felt like this before. Waves of feeling crash over me like massive rolling waves in a thunderstorm and I don't know whether to take cover in defense and hide like usual, or just stand and let the Lord take me now in repercussion to all the pain existing in this world today, all to be blamed on yours truly.

You know what's scariest? The fact that the problem was invisible to the naked eye. No one could see it except me and whoever I let know about it(and I let no one know about it because I didn't even think anything was wrong). I didn't even see it until it was far too late and denial had already wove itself a chokehold around my throat. If I hadn't chose to let it out though, the scariest thought is of how no one would have ever known until I probably was found in a ditch somewhere at twenty-something, too tired and icy to care anymore.

I looked in the mirror and saw nothing atypical, but mirrors lie and so do people, even if they don't even understand that themselves until years after the fact.

I've spent years trying to figure out who I am and all I've managed to find is that I may possibly know even less about me than the best friend sitting next to him, crying because of him, while he sits cold and expressionless because he thought his friend was only being a silly little kid.

I don't know anything anymore it sometimes seems like. I feel like my entire structure of thought and behavior has crumbled down around me, the remnants of my once beautified winter palace shattered like lonely icicles all around me.

Silly assumptions lead to consequences, hurt, and ultimately the destruction and cease of being, and I hold your hand to the edge, leading you while wearing the blindfold myself. And you trust me because you think that since I love you, I could never harm you. You're wrong.

And I'm so sorry.

So, so, so sorry.

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