Changing Alone

I tried to run from this idea. But it keeps finding me. I wish if I could disbelieve it, but it keeps proving to me that it is a truth. it finds me in the silence between distractions. it finds me when I am almost okay, and it sits beside me, it whispers, and it says: you are still here. still alone in this.

Doing it alone is hard. No one to see my progress. No one notices the night I chose to fight, the morning I got up when everything in me said stay down. No one is there to say I see it. I see what it is costing you. I just carry the evidence of my own becoming and have nowhere to put it. nowhere to share it. because of what? because I have never learn to.

No one sees the bleeding either. I learn to clean the wound myself, wrap it myself, and keep walking. keep functioning. No one tells me that I will be okay. And so I tell myself, some nights, in the voice I am not sure I believe yet. I’m not sure if it will last.

I don’t know how long I will be in this place. And it terrifies me. not the pain, but the not knowing when the pain has an end. not knowing it will finish. Changing alone is harder. Because when I change, there is no witness. no one to say you are not who you were, and I think by moving, I lost the person I was, the one I wanted to change, and it is hard to realize that the version I wanted to trade is hard to get, as I made the exchange of fighting the monster to take me back to myself. to the version I want to be, but I couldn’t. I lost myself, and I couldn’t hold who I’m should have become.

Now I can’t seem to hold both versions of myself at once, the one I am leaving, and the one I am becoming, and it feels hard to trust that the distance between them means something. And I don’t know if this distance is measurable.

Not blaming anything but myself is painful. It is the right kind of pain, perhaps, but it is still pain. and not sharing it, not naming life, and blaming it too. carrying it the way I carry a stone in a coat pocket, always weighing. is hard.

Me and my books. My pen and I. I and my thoughts that won’t leave me alone. a person in a room. no applause. no witness. just me, beating myself, with the very hands I am trying to heal. It is a strange war to be at war with myself. Every wound is self inflicted. Every sword is mine. And there is no enemy to face, only a mirror.

I am tired. I don’t think I can bend more. I think if one more thing asks something of me, the asking will be the last thing. I wish this war would end. I am tired of fighting someone I would rather love.