Unraveling

What Keeps A Monster Alive

He asked me to forget today. Memories flooded into me, pain at their trails. I stared, my eyes filling and spilling with tears. I asked him why he wanted this of me, knowing how ridiculous the question was. How absurd. After what my hurt had done to me and us. I knew. Shame crept up my throat as I told him “I can’t.” because maybe I could. I probably could. But you grow dependant on things. The high of a drug, the whirl of drunkenness, the feeling of pain. I was an addict. An open wound. My despair had become my refuge, my lifeline. Some kind of tether to myself. The color of what I used to be.

So when he told me we couldn’t live this way, my heart reeled at his leaving. It demanded his permanence. It pleaded no more loneliness. It cried for a ‘forever’ and I couldn’t give it to it.

I begged. I held him to me and swore forgetting. Offered every promise and hope I could wring from myself. I tore open my chest, bared myself. If he was to walk away, he would do it with my body at his feet, my blood growing thick inside dead veins. Because I was not alive before him. And I would not be after. I was cruel for this, I know it. Who was I to demand anything? How dare I?

But if you are to understand anything of a broken creature, it is that when you get a taste of something other than goddamn darkness, it becomes what you breathe.

— What Keeps A Monster Alive