Embrace Me (A Shatter Me FanFiction)

Chapter Four

Some people say tears have meaning. They give you a chance to reach down into the deepest, darkest holes in your heart and patch them up. They release all the bottled-up feelings that haunt you in your sleep, the same ones that cause you to be misunderstood, the ones that suck all the life out of you until you can't take it anymore and then

The tears dry up and disappear to give your body a chance to start fresh, to try again, to make you forget all the pain and start believing in something. To spark the flame again that once died out.

And my tears-

my tears have dried up. And I haven't forgotten the pain.

Because all it is is a vicious cycle. The hot tears that are your resentments spill out like a river, flowing out of you and purifying your essence, only for them to dry up and make you think they're gone, make you think the pain is gone, but your skin only soaks up all the same frustrations to nurture them into bigger monsters. And every time you think it'll be different, you think that something in you will change, only for your heart to be broken into a million fragments again and leaving you to pick up the pieces.

The more people you give your heart out to, the more likely it is that you'll get it back punctured with imperfections. And my heart has been battered, bruised, and thrown around carelessly like a toy by many people who don't know how to love. 

Your family didn't love you, the voice rings in my mind.

No one will ever love you, it echoes in my ears.

Gifting your love to someone, I think, might as well be handing them your heart and a knife and giving them the choice to either cut into it or show you mercy.

But there are only so many times you can sew the same holes in your heart before the threads refuse to hold them closed anymore. Before your heart gives up trying to beat for other people and the wounds get so deep that numbing the pain is useless.

Maybe our hearts aren't meant to be given to others. Maybe sharing your heart with another is too much blood for it to be responsible for, leaving it to eventually decay.

Our hearts cannot shatter if we keep them to ourselves.

I've been sitting here on the floor for some amount of seconds, minutes, hours that I don't care to know. All I know is that it's been long enough for the world to stop spinning and the lonely thoughts to be tamed down to a dull murmur. I just waste away in silence, paralyzed in my own body as time moves on without me, competing in this race against myself and my sanity that I know I'll never win. Every day I'm just jumping hurdles, barely making it over one and immediately being hit with another. I can almost see the walls closing in around me as I touch my hot face, red and scorched by his words.

I don't know what I just agreed to.

I don't know if anyone is looking for me, if anyone cares about me anymore, and then it occurs to me that it doesn't matter because my disappearing into nowhere once in a while is probably doing the world a favor. Maybe I should disappear forever. Yes, that would be nice.

It doesn't seem quite possible that my life was a blossoming flower that shriveled up and withered so quickly. That one decision changed my life course forever. And I want to write my existence into a script so that I can hit the delete button on my reckless behavior and everyone else's careless choices - maybe rewrite a happy ending for myself. Maybe just shove my broken bones into a box, lock it up tight, and bury it somewhere I'll never find it again.

This tattered, pathetic mess I'm curled up into is just a fresh reminder of the pain that soiled my childhood. I relive those events as they flash through my head like a movie, the tremors that rock my body just muscle memory from all the abuse I suffered. The familiar abandonment is introducing itself again, shaking my hand and saying hello and I'm terrified to say it back.