Rejection

It’s almost as though you know it’s about to come, that suffocating second right before it finally knocks on your door. You’re expecting it, you can almost feel the pressure of the universe forcing it down upon you as it draws closer…and you try to push it back, fight it, inhibit it…just slow it down, if that’s all that can be done.

But it’s going to come anyway. So there’s a part of you that’s simultaneously bracing for the impact. Readying airbags, that just ain’t full enough. Trying to cushion the hurt, when you know that nothing can absorb that shock. Not fully. In fact, not at all.

Because no matter what you do, or how hard you try, it will strike you just the same. Just as hard. Just as cruel as it’s supposed to. How can you tell pain’s been muted anyway when it comes back rolling every split second like an indestructible current of thunder?

And when it strikes you. It’s as though a part of you’s been pushed down somewhere. It sinks. A weight falling on your intestines. Pressing against your heart. Pursing your throat. Leaving nothing but a hollowness inside. They say there’s nothingness in a vacuum, then why is there pain?

It comes for many different things. I want to tell you it happened to me for something that hurt so bad, if only I could explain it to you. But beneath your sympathetic gaze and comforting smile, I can tell what you’re truly thinking. At the moment when I least want to read your mind, I can see your thoughts plastered on your forehead.

For all you really want to tell me is, you know what really hurts the most? No, you don’t. You haven’t been there yet, you’re still caught up somewhere else, you just won’t get it. What you’re going through? It’s just a phase and it’ll pass. And you’re letting it break you?

So, I begin wishing I get there. To that point when I’ll finally ‘get it’. When maybe, at long last, it’ll become perfectly valid for me to feel the way it does. When I wouldn’t have to explain it. Or fight it. When I can just let it overwhelm me as it’s supposed to, whether I like it or not. And it needn’t be understood.

You won’t be judged. You won’t be ‘insecure’. You won’t be scoffed at for being ‘weak’…or ‘naïve’. But it’s not them and their faces that hurt. It’s not their laughter, casually cruel or unwittingly innocent. It’s that face inside of you, scorning you for your own vulnerability, that you see in the reflection of their pupils.

So you know you’re hurting in your pain. And punching yourself down inside a little further each passing moment, that strange part of you that knows so much, yet acts like it knows it so little.

How can you blame the world for bringing you down? When you do it to yourself…

Who’s to blame? Who is the cause of this? What is that fault that needs to be fixed? That blotch that needs to be obliterated? That cavity that needs to be filled?

Where can I find it? Fill it. Crush it. Bind it. Fix it. Kill it.

End it.

And let it never come back.

Where?!

- Bushra
Based on a recent conversation, true events, and things that happen to all of us, all the time.

Narcissus by Caravaggio

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