the tumbling

i guess i should write.

my mom prays one day i will get the courage to write like i used to. i guess she means with flair and raw biting honesty.
i guess that will mean i need to remove these balls lodged inside my chest. the nearest one is just behind my lip, inside a bleeding gum. its connected to another, another, another...all the way down my spine into my intestines and up into the narrow veins in my brain.
i cannot think. i cannot feel. i can't seem to dislodge it because so much of my sanity sits poised on this carefully balanced structure and without it i feel i might shatter.

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the therapist calls it emdr. i feel like it is inception.
i remember specific memories and hold them in my hands until they burn and i am a slobbering mess. in my closet hiding lest he hears, while my therapist watches me on a tiny 3 inch screen unravel and dissolve and tells me he's here, he's here, focus, breathe.
i focus, i swing until my exhausted eyes numb the scalding hot memory. i break.
and repeat. and repeat. the pyramid of newspaper glass and thorny scrunched balls boxes i haven't opened in many years starts to come tumbling down.
the noise is deafening inside me, i lay crumpled on my sofa unable to move.

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later the next day A messages me out of the blue. i guess it must be so.
in another life i would've said he might've felt the tumbling across the country. in another life i was naive.
the tumbling has allowed enough of my voice to come through. i protest. i demand. i blubber out my anger. my hurt. i hold onto my fledgling ego and self-respect and scream in gently typed texts my confusion and pain.
'how can i make it better?'
promises to not abandon, a try and keeping the sanity, revelations of some sweetness that cause more pain than balm.
'i waited outside your door'

i still feel.....used. discarded. not good enough. never good enough. lacking. disappointing. small.
so utterly utterly small.

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the tumbling has dislodged people i forgot to take to court.
i digress, i didnt forget. i just didnt feel i had the right to.
i picture them one by one and rise in inches remembering i too have right to ask.
'why did you hurt me?'
' why did you leave me?'

why have i done this to myself?

i don't know. shif called me dil phek.
i was. i am.
i don't know what i was looking for.
a channel for my intensity i couldn't handle?
tenderness i need to balm my old grown-too-fast heart?

why did i always seek men?
why is it that no matter what kind of love i provided, friendship, emotional, physical, sexual, mental, whatever it was....just never good enough.
what is it about me that caused them all to disappear?
either i chose the weakest of men, or the strongest of men chose the weakness in me.

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im heartbroken.
i feel S is one of them and yet i don't want to add his name to the list.
i dont know why.
i think it is less that i want to give up on him and more i can't admit i have yet again loved the wrong one the wrong way and lost again.
i dont want another failure, the one i have given the most too.
and so i persist on loving him when he is the most unlovable. i persist on loving him when my heart is splitting apart with the angst he causes me.
i resolutely stop listening when parents tell me to leave, when my friends call it abuse, when i am cowering in the car because his drunk self is hammering on the glass snarling at me.
i try and remember the fledgling tenderness.
i use it to the glue all the newspaper and the tissue and the plastic and the thorn scrunched up bits and pieces of me and stuff it back down my throat least i fall apart again.

where would i go?
yes the freedom and the lightness of spirit, yes the reyhaai....but where?
a lifetime of abandonment and loss?
seeking and being used again and again and again?
i am so vulnerable right now any misleading intention masked in 2 honeyed words would be enough to let me melt and be abused... so where would i run?

no place is safe anymore. my room. the car. my mind. the closet. the world. other men.
what if i find myself trapped behind another white door in another city with another man on the other side?

kaisi reyhaai jab yeh andar sarah hi itna zehar se bhara hai?


_______________

what i wanted then and all i want even now.

a love that will not destroy me.
a love that will consume me and give me back more than what i give to it.
a relief wider than ocean and a tenderness like a crumpled petal
a sunshine mind that sings alongside my voice
a blue eternal sky and a togetherness that life and its gham cannot break apart
an ' i know you' that traverses down our shins with roots depp into the earth
a heart that understands when i am voiceless

i live in the unreal and i cannot cannot
pull anyone in here with me
i can't get out
i can't find anyone here

it is like inception. i am in a creation of my own mind with no relief.
i am alone and all i see and feel is fear
and the tumbling

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