Don't Speak

Don’t speak.

I don’t want to know what you’re thinking. I don’t want to know how you feel. I have heard your reasons in the past, and can’t hear anything from you any more, because it hurts. It hurts, not because of something you have said or done in the present, but because it is the dull ache of the past, with its memories and its reflected pain – pain that will only ebb once it has flowed.

I understand now why rebounds are so common – sometimes you need someone, anyone, to be there as you recover, as an emotional wrecking ball demolishing you every morning. Someone to distract you and occupy your mind when you let yourself be distracted and occupied. Someone to help you exorcise your demons by turning everything into equations of the material realm, exhausting you physically with repeated lovemaking till your mind shuts down from its extended overdrive and derives a few hours of clarity and peace.

Sometimes we are broken so bad that it takes more than just time to un-break – while we may spring back in our work and our flimsy social relationships, sometimes the fault lines run so deep that we don’t realise how bad it is until one morning, we look in the mirror and can’t recognise the person looking back at us.
Loss changes people. Always. But here, with this, I’m not entirely sure of the extent of my loss, or of the things I’ve lost. What do I know right now of the price I’ve paid in self-respect and self-confidence?