The trivial details clawed holes into trenches in my chest: the unexpected goodbyes, the hollow hellos, and the mornings without tea.
It was the days without being touched, the craving to be held that was only tangentially relative to my desire to live.
The hard truths and confessions never tattered me as hard as the little bits I pieced up myself. Like the scars on my mother’s neck and my father’s propensity to aggression. Or the silence of my phone, or why I never saw Riley again… The heartbreak overpoured with the shallow texts, not the paragraphs. It came with the enouement of endings long before they came. The glimpses of chapters coming to an end, the characters of my book fading with the ink.
I wondered why I never felt the anguish as gravely as everyone else for most of my life. There was just something about a sadness that prickled your skin, as though in teasing, as compared to the sorrow that crawled in your spine. It was often too poignant, at times devious. It faded in and out, it mocked you for feeling it and just when you thought you touched it, it vanished. Sometimes for seconds, for hours only to return. It could be compared to a loss so vaguely transparent that the world was convinced it would tear you whole. The difference was how it hid, under your smile, behind your everyday life only aggravating to the point it claws its way out.
Of course, the tumult was nothing linked to the grief of losing something you loved, it was just different. It sat on the bones under your shoulders, on the flesh under your tongue… sometimes on your palm. It was an abysmal kind of pain, one that often piled up in ways you couldn’t understand or trace.
The logic behind it always eluded me, for something so little to get enormous over time.
Not many would understand, the pain of looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger, or the pain of waiting by your phone for no one. Or the pain of not being strong enough to survive tomorrow, but strangely, strong enough to survive today.
It was, as I called it, the agony of living and growing. The little things that made me unwilling to get out of bed.
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