Everyone’s Ugly Once They Stop Hiding.
When people are no longer reluctant to repress their deepest wounds, a beast of deceit, aguish with an appetite for chaos is let out of its cage to feast on the vulnerable (you). When the monster has his teeth digging into the flesh of your incompetent human form, he doesn’t stop. Not until your body stops twitching and your mind has become incapacitated.
For the rest of your life, you’ll constantly relive this moment, if not, at least be paranoid of what others could do if you let it happen again.
Some of you may have experienced a time like this when you felt entrapped by someone else’s tyranny and had to fend for yourself.
This was one of those times.
And I deserved it.
Every teardrop, ounce of anxiety, sleepless night, betrayal, and unwanted pressure of the agony-flavoured cake I gulped down. It left me wanting to throw up every time. Even if there were leftovers, someone had to eat them.
The best thing was when it occurred, because the timing was perfect, just when I needed it. I keep these rotten moments of my youth unwillingly stored alive as they painfully bite back at me in moments of boredom, and even peace. Maybe they’re begging to die, even though they can’t.
“It never really did end. Did it? If so, why continue to dwell and have these sentiments strengthened as you reflect on them? Isn’t it time you let go of the hurt? What about your future self? How am I going to survive if you continue to keep twisting the knife, it’s you who’s losing blood, not the criminals of your memory — they’ll live on forever!”
“The knife’s not in my hand, but his.”
“Who’s hand?”
“Trauma’s.”
“Why bring this up, can’t you forget about it and look forward to the future or at least tomorrow? You’re wasting your time thinking about the past.”
“Perhaps honing on the greyest parts of my early life leads to the meaning I desperately seek.”
Why was I lashed by others’ resentment that left scars on my beliefs about any good left in the world? Why wasn’t anyone there to be vulnerable to offer the empathy a young boy needed? (WHY DID NO ONE BOTHER?) Why couldn’t I be open enough to talk about it, but brave enough to endure it? At this point, trust felt as if it was something unrealistic after what had happened.
My method to deal with it was by brushing those awful realities under the rug, hoping it would make a change and strangling them if they resisted. However hard I tried, I couldn’t silence them because those emotions wanted to be heard, not neglected like I was.
That monster was a part of me.
Never being heard is killing your younger self and if only I could have received the support I needed maybe things would be different.
“But you said that everyone has an ugly side to them, why?”
Because I’ve experienced their acid-like cruelness poured into my eyes firsthand. As well as the fires they’ve ignited because of the justice they seek from their unhealed issues. Their past gave them matches they tossed to burn my present to a crisp, letting the choking smoke fill up my memories, with my brain coughing up the abuse.
My skin may have grown thick, but the mirror of my eyes has already cracked, never being able to return to its original. They may innocently stare blankly into a wall and then a switch is flicked to drag me back to the miseries. They’ll force me to scrape into those stories and shovel into the details of ‘why it happened?’ And I was only a boy, a young boy, who had been ruthlessly stabbed by the hatred of others and left to bleed out like a victim of a hate crime.
Not even I can save myself from the pain that sunk its claws into my mind. Maybe if I died with my memories, I wouldn’t need to carry them around so often. I could finally drop the heavy load of this deformed, traumatised identity and be born afresh.
No one could have seen this far into the long road of hurt that was tattooed on me. It was as if hiding the tattoos under a long dress shirt from the boss’s judgement would save me from torment. Even though covering up the pain intensified it.
I worry for the boy if he will ever recover from such tragedies. Yet he remains very alive in those nightmares, running from them on a loop in the obscurities of his mind.
Every-single-day.
