bleeding heart || stuff

boxes and books.

flowery language is kind of my thing.

not actual flower language, although that's something i love too. but poetic words and abstract thoughts.

that's another issue of mine. it's so easy to box up trauma and tie it with a pretty bow, making something so jagged and rough fit nicely into the recesses of a mind. and, when packaging it like that, it's so easy to stumble upon it at a later time, thinking something lovely must be wrapped up like that, and getting the horribly shitty surprise that is the snake in a can of your trauma.

sometimes it's a blessing. but sometimes the box opens up and little details slither their way out, like the way the hair on the back of my neck stands on end when strangers compliment me, and the haunting feeling of shrinking and losing some of my protective barriers as i mentally become fifteen again. i shrink in height and personality, making myself become small and dull and lifeless like the hair that fades from vibrant happy shades back to the dark brown of my formative years.

and honestly, i'm done closing the box. i'm done retaping the sides and fixing the seams, because all it's going to do is allow me to repress this further, and the impact years down the road will be worse.

what if my significant other accidentally touches my thigh and catches me off guard, and i break down? what if someone sits a little too close to me in public and i burst into tears?

i need to open the box and sift through the contents. i have to let myself live through it again, but this time, instead of withering away under pressure and repacking the box, i need to throw it away. i have to declutter my mind and let go of those traumas, or else i'm never going to get better.

i'm sick and tired of falling back to old memories, to bad ones. i deserve to be okay. i deserve to be at peace with myself. i fucking deserve to leave this behind, because i'm sick and tired of suffering due to what other people have done to me.

i can go through the boxes. i can label them. but the only thing that's going to make things better is if i get rid of them completely.

—

another way to put this is that i've got a shelf full of books on the wall.

each book is an index on every interaction i've had with a person. from the good to the bad to the embarrassing. if i've ever made a weird remark, trust me that it's been remembered.

sometimes, i'll slam a door shut, the bass from a song shakes the wall, or something makes another box elsewhere fall, and those books better kept shut will tumble off the shelf and open, spilling darkness and embarrassment and anger and sadness.

i scramble to pick them up again, but my eyes always scan the pages and make my heart ache from the words they read. i tell myself not to, but i always forget the promise i made. but some of the pages are stuck together, full of memories i can't access.

like with the boxes, i need to rid myself of some of these books. why do i need a file on a girl i knew for a week and haven't seen in probably thirteen years, especially if i can't access all the memories i had with her? i remember her name, her hair color, where she was from, and the weird fact that we would hide from my brother in the bathroom at camp.

i understand the one that's been dropping the most lately. six years and eleven months of friendship, heaps of memories. i want to remember the good and forget the bad, but i can't. i can't let myself do that.

i need to remember that no matter how much good she brought into my life, she brought in twice as much bad at the end. it's been exactly seven months and eight days since i cut her out. it's been a month and a half since she called me out of nowhere saying that she was there if i wanted to talk. which... what the actual fuck was that call anyway? i'm starting to think she gets an adrenaline rush from fucking with my head.