Unraveling

Do you know what it’s like to feel your life unravel? All your plans, hopes, and dreams for the future, coming apart at the seams. All the strings, holding you together, ripping apart. It splits you apart. All the feelings you have start crushing you, like the weight of a thousand boulders. It’s like your heart is ripping itself out, piece by microscopic piece. It feels like your soul is shredding, as if it were paper, disintegrating into nothing. Your lungs burn like a match has been set to them. Your stomach aches, as if a giant hand is wrapped around it, squeezing you in half. Every muscle in your body tingles with a sickening warmth. Your brain wants to fix it, the pain you’re feeling, but your consciousness makes it worse. But you can’t sleep, because you fear you’ll miss something important: a phone call, a text. Something that will make everything better. Something that will stop the aching in your soul. Every day that passes, without so much as a word, rips you apart even more. Every day you think, “This can’t go on, not much longer.” But it still continues. The silence stretches, longer and longer. How do you deal with it? How do you make the pain better? You distract yourself with people, but every person you see knows what’s happened, somehow. They ask you, “How are you doing?” or “How are you holding up?” And then you have to explain, and the crushing of your heart comes back. It hurts, worse than before. But you can’t cry, not around these people. You can’t let them see you unravel. They won’t help you, even though they say they will. The only person who can help you is the one hurting you. So you give in to your distraction. You have meaningless conversations and pretend to be okay. You drink alcohol, to numb the wounds in your soul. But none of it helps. You still feel the pain. So you go “home”, even though all you want to do is run away. You want to run from the pain, but it’s impossible. It follows you, because it is you. You are pain. You are sad, and nothing and no one can make it better. All you can do is try to keep going. Try to sew your future back together with the remaining pieces. It won’t be the same. The bright light has vanished, replaced by a black hole. This is what it’s like to feel your life unravel. This is what my life has become.