Leaving flowers behind on the grave of my past.
Nobody talks about how you are still in as much pain as you always were having lost someone you loved deeply. They don't talk about it because nobody believes it. They ask you to move on. Come on, get a grip, they've been dead for two years now. Five years now. A decade now. But no matter how long it has been, it always hurts. Every single day. But you can't talk about it because people will either therapize you with a drizzle of pity or they will pretend they care. So you carry that pain on your heart until you die.
I carry that pain not with me, but in me. Right there in the center of my heart. I must, because if I do not, I risk losing all our memories. But those memories drive me... they make me who I am. I just cannot lose them. So I keep the memories and I keep the pain.
I need to stop dancing with the illusions in my head, the ones like shadows of a glass painting. It is all fiction: I have built an idea, a character, and I have loved it as I would love the person in real life.
He is an idea, he is an illusion, and as we clink our glasses and celebrate our four-and-a-half-year anniversary in my mind, he chugs down beer at a pub with his new friends in his new life, in real life. I keep thinking what if, what if I told him exactly how I felt instead of closing off, what if I told him exactly how cute the pendant was, exactly how happy the idea of mango shake made me, exactly how much everything he did meant to me. Would things have been different? Who knows, so I play out happier endings in my mind.
Some people put their faith in actions and some in words. I put mine in the latter. So when he said he would never stop caring about me, I believed him. When he said he loved me, the new me, the old me, I believed him. When he told me we would never drift apart, I believed him. But then he switched to another lane so quick and I fell sideways by inertia.
All the words I had built myself upon fell to the ground slowly, as if it were a movie, like snowflakes fall from the sky. No, I do not blame anyone. I hate to hold grudges. So I tried to stay friends... But just as I do not deserve to go crazy because of these once uttered words, he does not deserve to have me in his life. Maybe he left because I was holding him back too. Either way, it will never be fair of me to drag him into the mess I have made in my mind. So I will not.
I always go back to read old chats, be it with family or friends or lovers. As I regard each word with the faith only a strong-willed idiot would, I fall deeper into the spiral of my mind. So today, I decided to run a psychological experiment. Instead of reading old text messages, why don't I delete my discord account? Instagram? Facebook? Even WhatsApp? Will it work? Come on Soberly Drunk, let's do it for the sake of science. Let's see if this can fix your insanity. Cut off everything that tethers you to the past.
So I'll do it. I will drag along not a single soul from my old life because they don't deserve the garbage that I bring into their lives.
There's a flower for everyone. I am so grateful I had wonderful, amazing school friends. There are some high school memories I will never forget, especially the feeling of school being my second home. I'm also extremely grateful for the guy I loved, with whom I shared a wholesome experience despite everything else. I'm thankful for the friendship that bloomed online with the guy I would say was my bestest friend ever, the one with the purest heart and the one I felt the happiest with. I'm also grateful for the girl I was sure would be my BFF whom I love a lot still. There are more flowers for everyone and everything else I didn't mention.
I am not okay now, but one day I will be. And then I can truly look back with fondness and gratitude, and not just pain.