in too deep

Realisation

The smell of chlorine takes me back. The stinging sensation in my eyes when shampoo runs takes me back.

The feeling of a warm, large hand anywhere on my skin takes me back.

Though that last one doesn't happen very often, well, at all, anymore.

And even that takes me back. Whenever I'm driving, air whittling past and kissing my skin where instead there should be a warm touch, I go back to that time. To him.

Everything takes me back.

And I know that there are things that can take away these feelings of...obsession?

Yes, obsession.

But these things are all temporary.

The feeling of being drunk is one.

I love the way that for a while all of my thoughts are dispersed, not gone, but dispersed into the darker corners of my mind, making space for better ones.

But it doesn't last.

The feeling of burning myself, be it with a cigarette or be it with a lighter, is another. This is solely because all the pain I feel is concentrated for at least a few seconds before my skin begins to split. There is something charming, to me, about that.

There are more, of course, sex, being punched slap bang in the centre of the face, but all are temporary.

And maybe, maybe, if I could do them all at once, that would make me okay again, but that day is yet to come.

But yet again, if I look deep enough into myself, all of these things take me back as well, they just don't last long enough for me to realise it.

We used to get drunk together, and he used to poke me with his lit cigarettes to get my attention. And the sex, he would whisper to me, so gently, all the while, burning with a fire so deep and passionate that I could feel it burning through me too. So, in actual fact, there is no escape from him. From them, all of his friends too; my friends.

I guess, that if trying to escape from him doesn't work, then I won't try. I won't. I will sit, in my own room, on my own bed, and I will recall everything that I did, that he did, that our friends did with us and what we did with our friends, and I will tell my story through and through to myself until I feel I am over what happened; until I am over the love I had for him, for them all. Until I am over the story itself.

This may take a while, but the best I can do is start from the start.