Fragments of Me: Echoes in the Mirror

The Breaking Point

"Can we come back from this?" He says, staring at me with wide eyes, his hands shaking from the adrenaline coursing through his veins.

My heart was pounding so loudly in my chest that I could barely hear him over the rushing in my head. How could we now? I don't even understand how any of this happened in the first place. My vision was blurry and it seemed like the room was spinning so violently that I almost wondered if I could keep standing.

"Hello? Please respond to me! What do I do? I can't do this by myself!"

His words fell on deaf ears as I stood there paralyzed by... by what? I couldn't even make sense of the feelings that were flooding my head. Downstairs lay the many things we couldn't replace or hide... The toppled over plants, overturned chairs, broken plates, and the countless other items scattered across the floor. I didn't know what we were going to do or how we were going to handle any of this... Let alone us... What do we do?

My hands-stained red-kept shifting before me, the color brightening, deepening, then disappearing. The blood was a phantom, but it felt real, seeping through my skin like poison. A part of me wondered if it was mine, or his. It was almost as if time had slowed down and I was moving at a snail's pace compared to the rest of the world around me. I looked up at him, his face blurry and twisting into shadows and shapes before coming into clear view. His hair was disheveled, but clean... He was torn apart, but in perfect condition... Almost as if I couldn't decide what to see when I looked at him. My heart was aching in my chest and venomous words rose up in my throat, unleashing before I could bite them back.

"Why do you have to ask such stupid fucking questions?!" I snarled, my anger uncontrollable. "Why can't you just leave me alone? You always have to start shit."

I moved toward him before I could catch myself, closing the distance between us as he shrank back. Anger surged through me, unstoppable. What was wrong with me? I thought, panicked. Why can't I just stop? The rage felt alien, but so did everything else in that moment.

The words continued to pour from my mouth, full of venom and spite, aiming to hurt and tear him apart as I screamed at him. Tearing every piece of him apart with my hands, breaking him down to nothing in front of me, causing him the same pain I felt at his hand. His flaws, his anger, the parts of him he hated, the things he never wanted to become, everything... I pulled it all out and laid in down in front of him, forcing him to look at himself the way I saw him. I rubbed his face into all of the sharp glass he forced down my throat, the things he had done and said to me were now inside of him. Tearing him apart just like they did to me, but I felt no remorse, no pain, no sadness for the now broken man that lie in a puddle at my feet, begging for me to show mercy, to show any sort of kindness to him... Kindness that he didn't seem to think I deserved when he was doing the same to me... It never pays to be the one being kicked on the ground, does it?

"Why?! Why are you doing this to me?!" He cried, covered in the pieces of him that I had exposed.

"You never gave me an answer when I asked you." I folded my arms, the bitterness rising in my throat. "So why should I give you one now?"

His cries echoed off the dark walls in the void we were encased in.

"What did I do to you? I've never hurt you! I always did what was best for you! I sacrificed myself for you!"

I gritted my teeth, the lies still poured out of his mouth even when the truth was right there. How can he even do that?!

"You have lied to me, broken promises, hurt me, and so much fucking more, yet you think you have done no wrong? The promises you make mean nothing when all you do is break them. Sacrificing the parts of yourself that hurt others is NOT a fucking sacrifice. That is called growing and healing as a person, which is something you always fail to do. You always 'fix' a part of yourself just to replace it with something as broken and fucked up as the one you removed. You can't say you've done what's best for me, no, it's always been what was best for me ONLY if YOU benefited from it too. It was never done just for me... It was never just to make sure I was safe from you... You only ever thought about yourself, but because you tried to weave me into it you were able to lie to yourself enough and make it seem like it was all for me... No... it was just for you...." The anger was obvious in my voice, though it threatened to break down into sobs. How could he truly believe that he was helping me? All he ever did was do things for himself, sometimes it was for me, but never the behavior things... Never.... Why?!