Blind Ear

I know that speaking the terrifying words of sickly truth about a past too ugly and damaging to remember paints a dripping red letter on my back. I’ve had to look into the eyes of smiling faces, watching them turn to empty stares; never smiling at me the same way again. I’ve had to wave smiling as the backs of people I called friends disappear into the blurry summer night, never to be seen or spoken of again. As if knowing is the same thing as having to have fucking lived it.

They shy away, hurt like a wounded animal, slinking off and whimpering like they can’t stand it. I may be wounded, but I'm surviving. I've been blending and dodging, blocking and running my whole life. There's a big difference between crazy and broken.

Broken is being smashed onto the floor and having all the shards swept to the corners of the room, with some of them shoved down the vents, and tossed out windows into the yard, so you can never be glued back together. Crazy is thinking the haunting destruction that has decimated my life will somehow leap from my veins and also take you out.

Just leave if things are too overwhelmingly dark, don’t say you are waiting with your hand out, only to run at the last second as I reach for it in desperate need of support. Sniveling for help as if you were assailed in the dark. Yours is the last hand I ever reach toward. I will never again be sent sprawling onto my face, left with no means to evade my fate; my mind is always prepared to execute a solo escape.

K.B. Silver