Delicate

I feel as though I used to have so much. Ambition was never something I had to seek. Creativity seethed through the cracks in my skin and course through every single moment I ever lived. Writing stories & songs, playing any instrument I could squeeze into my schedule, finding art in every corner or fragment of my heart in all circumstance.

Passion used to be my very essence.

I craved learning and growth and saw every single speed bump, pothole, and curb as an opportunity. All I wanted was to solve, to create, to engineer, to research, to give and, even in the darkest and emptiest times, my thoughts were always angled to what was next.

I’ve never given up the way I have now.

I used to burn with love for flowers growing in sidewalk cracks, and trying and failing and trying again. I used to have this fiery sense of justice and fierce protection of values and empathy. A belief I could do right in the world; a need to have an impact.

Energy, I think, is what I’ve lost.

I miss myself.

I miss the person I loved that was resilient and quick-thinking, and poured everything into everything because I existed in no other way than to have the biggest, most intense, over-the-top enthusiasm for living.

I used to appreciate my hurt, channel it even into artistic expressions of the reminder that pain comes temporarily to remind you of how great the joy is. But in recent years, the pain no longer is temporary. The pain has become the inevitable constant and the joy? A short-lived temporary relief from a reality that I desperately want to escape.

I don’t know whether to grieve her or to fight for it back because I’m so scared of what losing that fight will do to me. I think I’m realizing that when I keep saying “I have nothing left”, I’m speaking more to or of myself than things or people in my life.

I don’t want to have died, but I don’t know if fighting for this life is like living in denial or delusion. And I know some would say I won’t know until I try, but I can’t describe what it’s like to grieve a life I’ll never get to live.

I never used to believe in impossibilities, but now it feels like every second of every day is shrouded in them. I am so tired. I wish so badly I had any ounce of energy to put into anything other than merely surviving.

I wish for my memory back, my strength, my sharpness, my resilience, my kindness, my patience, my ‘me’.

I think I am a shell of myself now. And every time life hits me again, I crack like porcelain, and the dust of my old self is swept out from the openings in the wind that follows the blows.

But I am hardened.

I can’t move my arms or hands to try and gather the dust or the pieces. I can only watch as they float away into the air of those around me, causing them to cough and choke on the remains of who I once was.

The dirt and ash leave a bitter taste on the tongues and sting the eyes of those who’ve loved me.