Shame That Is Not Shameful

Actions cannot be undone, words cannot be unsaid.

There is an ineloquence to her silence, it is loud and it is blunt. Her heartbeat echoes in her ears, a taunting metronome beating each second as if teaching her a lesson; she learns to self-medicate, to stop from self-deprecating; numbing from the inside out. Enabling her own destruction, she is biting the hand that feeds her and biting her tongue.

You think this is easier than the last time, because you are not angry anymore, you do not shout, you are not moved by their disruption, you are numb from the constant tapping. You think this is harder than the first time because at least then it was fresh, it was new, it was sharp. Quick, like the stick of a needle, count back from ten – ten, nine, eight, then seven, seven is black. But this, this is red, this is hours, days, and weeks of pins and needles, this is local anaesthetic, this is scalpels and pressure and volumes of aching – an unwritten novel about the pain at the tips of your eyelashes that never goes away.

Grief comes in waves with a tide that won’t retreat; dragging grains and pebbles of memories leaded and weighted with regrets.

No man is an island; this woman is an ocean of despair.