Author's Note: This is something I wrote from a darker place, I haven't left, but at least now there's light. I thought it was worth sharing, enjoy.




     What do you call a person who never seems like the same person twice when

they look in the mirror? What do you call a person who puts on a veil everyday, and

hides the agony that he bears like the heavens bear upon atlas...?


     Physical pain is real, tangible; it manifests itself as a wound or a symptom of

something else. Emotional pain is the product of a chemical equation with reactants

that couldn’t, or rather, shouldn’t have mixed. The reactants love and death yield a

product of pain. The reactants romantic love and close friendship also yield deep pain,

and friendship is not a product.


     Pain is a cross to bear; our scars, whether we choose to show them or not tell

an unedited history. The origin of our scars are the origins of our fears. The stinging,

never healing wound remains infected, oozing the pus that makes us turns raw pain

into anger, depression, fear. Sometimes the gash is too big to hide, so instead of hiding

the gashes we hide ourselves. We hide behind anger and sadness, behind depression

and loneliness, we lay in a fetal position weeping behind the dumpster that is envy and

regret. We try to separate ourselves from our scars, but the more it’s covered, the

worse it gets. We do whatever we can to the wound to try and change ourselves in a

way we stubbornly justify as “for the better.” (Better for who?) Even if we do such a

good job covering ourselves that everyone else only sees what we want them to, we’ll

always know what’s really there. We’ll never forget about the wound, because we can

still feel it. That wound continually reminds us of what could have been, of what we

should’ve done, of who we should’ve said goodbye to.


      Some of the worst pain, in my experience, comes from having to look at its cause

every day. How do you live, coexist, even socialize with the person who causes you so

much pain? Every time you lay eyes on them your scar gets torn open all over again.

You can’t get away -- you can’t abandon what you love. You can’t live without the very

thing that cut so deep. But it hurts so much that even under anonymity I can’t bear

to write about it without hiding behind the cryptic barrier that is the second-person

narrative.

     This is me, embracing my pain. I’ve convinced myself that the only way to move

on is to talk it through and reduce it to something explainable. I love the person who

hurt me, but he doesn’t even know he hurt me. Frankly, I made him hurt me. I decided

to let myself fall in love with him -- I let myself fall in love with my best friend. And then

I told him. I knew nothing would be the same, even with him being as understanding,

as loving, as accepting as he was. I knew I would never be able to to text him “love you

bro” again, and I knew he would never say that again either. I knew that I had seen him

casually undress in front of me for the last time. I knew I would lose so many of the

things I loved about him. I now know that even as minor as it’s become, it will still have a

presence in our friendship, creating unspoken rules, compensating for itself, adjusting

the terms of our relationship so that he never has to look at that object, that arrow

pointing in one direction from me to him, that arrow that reads “I Love You.”