She wanted to die.
He wanted to live.
•••
A hand grabbed onto my wrist, yanking me back just as the train rushed past, before I'd even had time to comprehend whether or not I'd carry out the action. I stumbled back into the person's chest, my hear...
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What is peace without chaos?
I once thought that the two were separate entities, until I realised I'd been growing up in a house where the two could only ever be intertwined. Chaos was where I found my peace, hence why I found solace in the rumbling of oncoming trains and low idle chatter of the night. The silence was unnerving, leaving me fretful and on edge as I was left mulling in my own paranoia of when I might hear Him next; so I preferred the noise, the pain, the comfort of staying in the darkness – the chaos.
When you've been raised amidst chaos, and found serenity in calamitous moments, glimpses of what true peace felt like – unadulterated peace that wasn't tainted with traces of ignorance or naivety – felt unfathomably conflicting.
Because mere minutes ago, up on the tenth floor as the sun's golden rays had been cascading down onto us in marigold streaks, I had felt a peace that was different to the chaotic serenity I had learned to adore. The intensity of Romeo's gaze mixed in with the song playing in the background and the penultimate moments of the sunrise had all felt so overwhelming my brain hadn't been able to put a word to the emotions – but I knew that one of them had certainly been peace.
But it wasn't peace as I'd known it; it wasn't fearful and fleeting, like the calm before the storm or the comfort of staying wrapped up in my trauma. It was peace that felt like I was being freed, peace that came with taking the first steps to finding myself, peace that accompanied the end of my bondage to the rope around my hands that had been dragging me down.
Prior to that, telling Romeo the secret that had stained my insides was a hurdle I'd known I'd needed to jump for a while, but I'd just never truly had the courage to implement so much of my life into another person. I'd gotten through the summary of the tense relation between Him and I while only shedding a few tears, and that achievement alone had felt like a dizzying sort of bliss, like the first lungful of air after having your head underwater.
That type of peace didn't even feel like it should come under the same word, because no amount of comparisons could ever amount to the deep stir of liberation that arose from me making the conscious decision to start healing myself – the decision that I was going to try not to let Him dictate the way I felt and thought, or let Him hold any responsibility in the way I perceived myself.
But just like every good thing, the purity of the peace I felt had to end eventually.
It had only been a matter of time before chaos seeped its way in, infiltrating the serenity with its cacophonies of warning, demonstrated in the form of the security guard interrupting myself and Romeo. In mere seconds the unadulterated peace I'd been experiencing morphed into the calamitous peace I learned to crave; I couldn't deny that the slightest part of me felt more relaxed in the hurried rush to make it into the lift than when Romeo's lips had brushed against my skin in the most alluring manner.
I'd been so conditioned to the chaos that part of me, no matter how much I tried to suppress it, would always find comfort in the commotion. Peace just couldn't stand to function without chaos, because they complimented each other so well that I found it hard to pick a preference between the two.
