Split Sides

A Thousand Cuts

Drip, drip, drip,
Everything I do is always wrong.
Drip, drip, drip,
I can't recall a time when I was ever right.
Drip, drip, drip,
I don't know why I can't do things the right way.
Drip, drip, drip,
Neverending insults and criticisms that weigh me down.

It's like I'm in a room
But I'm not "part of" the room.
I stand alone in a vast emptiness
While a god hurtles gnawing memories at me
From a heavenly beam of light up above.
My one source of salvation and hope
Has denied and denounced me at every turn.
I've made my mistakes, I know where I went wrong,
And believe me, I'm trying to make things right.
But despite them being honest errors done
In the naivety and rush of youth,
I find myself continuously paying for them
A decade after they were made.
In that sense, I must be like an ex-con:
I made my crime, I served my sentence,
And I'm back in the free world I came from.
But the haunting memory, that tragic impulse,
Stalks me as constantly as an accusing shadow,
The weight of the misdeed always on my mind.
Sometimes I want to shout:
"When will this punishment end at last,
And when can I start a new life?"
Again, I yearn for answers I can't find
So I must keep living and scrounging,
Never to know for certain
When the past will end
And the future will begin.

It's a terrifying place to be in, this void;
You wake up and you find yourself in it.
You don't know how you got here
And you don't know how to get out.
You're stuck in a physical purgatory,
A no-man's-land of endless nightmares.
You get tired of looking for a way out,
So you lie down and sleep,
Hoping to find any kind of relief.
But you wake up, you're still here,
And you're out of your mind in hopelessness.
So you do the logical thing:
Having exhausted yourself to pieces
Getting out of here without success,
You take it slowly by grinding your teeth
At this unwanted peace, to be stuck day by day.
You steadily come to terms with your situation,
Because the solutions won't be readily available.
You settle down, begin to make yourself comfortable
And look for ways to make the most of this.
Soon, days turn into weeks, and into months, and into years
And before you know it, you've lost track of time.
This place, this endless purgatory
Has now become your home
You've grown accustomed to.
Even when people come to you,
Worried about the state you're in,
You just brush it off, say it's nothing
Because you haven't died from it, so it's okay.
But deep inside that crevice you call a heart,
You live with the torment of insecurity,
Never to know what "Home" will look like,
Or who will have your back in tough times.
You don't know that, you don't know what it's like,
Because you've lived for so long without it.
What do you do? Who will you turn to?
When you have nothing to lose,
But nothing to live for,
Where do you go? What's next?