Telling Stories

Truth is like a needle in a haystack and I don’t have a magnet strong enough to draw it out of you. The words I want to let loose churn inside me: I’m nauseous. The words you need to hear will do nothing but make me want to disappear: this is the game and everybody knows the dice are loaded. I look around me just to see if anybody cares because I have a sense of humor.

Please smile and me while I smile back at you with gritted teeth. Jesus endured the cross for me, so I’m learning to forgive. Right now it’s hard to swallow: I eat bitterness but this is too bitter. I make lemonade but it’s hard to find sugar when I can only find fake things that taste sweet. I don’t know how to believe anything I see.

I swallow pain but it’s hard to stay quiet right now. Like the cliche vinyl I have on my wall, I’ve learned to dance in the rain, but this is hail. It’s easy for us to forget the things that didn’t hurt us. Or to wash our hands with hot water and extra soap. I look to the future through the eyes of a woman who thinks with her amygdala. It hasn’t even been two years since I walked away from hell on earth: who do you expect me to be?

You made this.

Literally and figuratively. Why do we give birth to what lives and breathes but yet, is unwanted? You say a lot of things, all contradictory. When we’re on good terms, it makes me wonder what you want from me. What can we trust when it’s hard to know if anything is real? How can we discern what is true and what is not when the truth, itself, is a shapeshifter?

Everything is relative.

It shouldn’t be, but it is. I fight PTSD like it’s some kind of fire but nothing is sufficient to wage war with the flames. Sometimes, I stare into space for entertainment. What gives you the right to belittle a kind of pain you have not, a day in your life, experienced? I want to tell you not to say you understand me, but it’s pointless.

You don’t listen.