It's time to jump off

I sit here brimming with anxiety, a defeated anger, fear and immense sadness. My core feels vast as a barren land with no streaks of happiness, sharp and numb cyclical pain, tears ready but too exhausted to shed themselves. So many questions, never enough answers. The questions and answers merge to become a dull noise. In the forefront is a realization and a desire. A realization of the wrongs, a desire to not continue realizing or feeling or knowing. 

Revisits to troubled pasts are always traumatizing. A troubled past brings pain of a different kind than a lost past. And I am tired of choosing, so they all come as they are, when they want. I have no defenses anymore. I let my guard down and allowed myself into my heart. I let the walls dissolve, the compartments crumble, the curtains burn. And there they all were, staring right at each other. All those dark waters of sorrow and pain. All those faces with mascaras running in black tear trails. I let go of the ways that would freeze these faces and dull the hurt. Together, all of my tear-trailed faces are more powerful than me. They know me like nobody does. And they were not out to get me until I unleashed them. 

I think of my childhood, my teenage and my adult years before the time when I realized the combined debilitating mass of what I had not let go. Love can’t cure this, success can’t soothe this, this remains elusive and unreachable. I wish I would have protected my core from the storms of love, from the beatings of failures, from the scars of trauma, from the disintegration of loss. I couldn’t see what I was doing by letting people, places, events and aspirations have access to my core and then attack it wild. Strangely, my battles are not with them anymore, they are within myself. 

I feel as vast and lonely as the cosmos, as tiny and insignificant as a speck of sand. I dwell in the past, present and future simultaneously. I look back and forth in slight disbelief but with clarity as confusion dissolves with all the walls now gone. I am somebody’s muse, somebody’s love, somebody’s hatred, somebody’s longing, somebody’s inspiration, somebody’s rejection, somebody’s comfort, somebody’s pain, but I am a nobody to myself. I let myself be robbed off an identity. The truths indeed are ugly.

I go back to times when my teenage self would look at the sky to find sadness in every bit of the dark distance. I could not comprehend the reasons and meaning of that empty feeling in its entirety. And after it all came a full circle about 15 years from that time, I made the mistake of tracing my steps back on the circle without realizing that I would lose the beginning and the end. That’s what circles are.

It’s time to jump off. Otherwise, I will live and relive, die and be reborn in this circle only to get nowhere. it’s time to go far away, like I did a long time ago. This time around, I need to go far away from myself, from these battles and wounds, from this despair of not knowing who I am. As hard as that sounds, the harder question is do I confront all those tear-trailed faces of mine before leaving or spend my life learning to ignore them as they stare and plead?