Here in the dark with the music all around me like water, am I a tragedy?
If I walked and kept walking, would I shed what has happened to me?
Am I repulsed as I used to be, by my past and my helplessness, or is this what healing feels like?
Not the presence of joy, but the absence of pain?
We can never go back.
Like a crystal vase shattered on the floor, wholeness just isn't possible the way it used to be.
We can never regain innocence we lose.
I can't tell if I still mourn it, or if I just recognize the space it used to fill.
What will fill it now?
And yet it doesn't hurt.
Will I end up crumbling like you, darling, in a beautiful melody?
In bittersweetness and chagrin?
In irony?
It is bitter cold outside, and I don't recognize my silhouette in the mirror.
Is what it means to stop being a child simply to exist with losses you never thought you could survive?
Am I old, again, in another way? Too soon, again?
You'd think I'd be used to that by now.
I can stop now, you know.
Stop and think without fear.
I used to be running, running constantly from any moment to remember, from any reminder.
And now I have suddenly found that I can stand stock still,
And I don't know what to do.
I've been running for nearly a year.
How will I unlearn my curses and find a new way to exist?
But...thank you, world, for this chance.
I had stopped hoping,
So many times had I deceived myself that I was whole.
I didn't know that the only way to be okay was to accept that I never will be again.
There is a life in that, you know.
I think, for most people, that that is the difference between childhood and adulthood. The moment when you accept that you will never be innocent again.
The shock always hurts, the ripping pain of having it torn from you by whatever suddenly stripped the last of it away,
But once all the denial and grief and anger and madness has ebbed, you realize that
You have become someone new.