break my heart

three

After

It appears that good things in life never seem to come to me easily. I thought that uprooting my life to start fresh and to be in a place free of any reminders of the past would help me heal, make it easier to move on - but this is not the case. The past latches on in ways I never even thought of; tainting my everyday life with its venomous bite. An abundance of flashbacks and triggers lurk around every corner, ready to drag me away from the present. As I walk along the aisle in the grocery store, I have to remind myself why I'm even here, what I'm doing.

We need milk.

I quickly locate the right fridge and pick up a carton of milk, carefully placing it in my basket amongst an assortment of other food that I was craving as I wandered the store trying to remember what I had originally come for. I peek into the basket, where there sits a chocolate bar, a packet of biscuits, 4 apples, a bag of tomatoes and, now, a carton of milk. In the past, I would never have picked up a chocolate bar - just knowing the hoard of empty calories that lurked within the bright packaging would have been enough to make me sick - but as I've realised that the only way I'm going to be able to rid myself from the past is to face it head on. Well, maybe not head on, but baby steps are better than nothing.

I decide to head to the checkout before I end up filling my basket with more things that I really don't need at the moment. I can't exactly afford to waste my money on food I don't need anyway, mindless buying is not worth suffering through extra shifts at work and besides, I need some new clothes anyway. This is probably why I should never shop for food while I'm ravenous - my diet of the day only consisting of the apple and coffee I had at the start of the day.

While I'm leaving the store with all the items bundled in my arms, I give a flustered smile to the worker I pass on the way who is watching me with an amused smile as my biscuits slip from my fingers.

"You okay there?" he asks, picking the packet up and balancing it safely on top of the apples.

"Yeah I'm all good thanks, have a nice day," I say, attempting to hide my awkwardness by smiling again as I rush towards the doors before I drop anything else.

The shops aren't very far from my apartment, so it's only a short drive before I'm stumbling through the door, dumping the groceries onto the kitchen bench and collapsing into a heap onto the couch with my chocolate bar. I tear the packet open and sigh contently after I've taken a massive bite out of it, my stomach settling slightly at the appearance of sustenance, although I'm not sure how nutritious a chocolate bar is.

"Hey is that you?" Kyra asks from in her bedroom, "how was classes? Did you get the milk?"

"Yes it's me, classes were alright and yes I got milk," I answer, not moving from my place on the couch as I hear her enter the room, "how was your day?"

"Fabulous, I absolutely love having a long shift at work and then coming home to my assignments," she sighs, "at least there's milk now so I can make tea. Tea is ungodly without milk. Black tea, bleh!"

"Hallelujah for cows then," I reply unenthusiastically, "let us praise the magnificent beasts."

"You are so weird."

"Thank you."

She leaves me alone on the couch and I pull out my phone to look at any missed messages, which there is only one from Instagram telling me that someone has posted. It isn't something that particularly interests me, so I put my phone back in my pocket and stare at the ceiling instead. It seems pointlessly staring at the ceiling whilst horizontal has quickly become a regular pastime of mine, especially since I've found myself living the single life.

It's in moments like these that I find my mind wandering, peeking through cracks in doors that I thought I'd locked long ago. In times of weakness, I can't help but wonder how I even got to this point in my life. I can not think about it for days, floating blissfully through life and then, with no warning, I can be pulled below the surface where it's dark and cold and no matter how loudly I shout, no one will ever hear me. I always have to pull myself out. Although my heart has managed to gather and glue the pieces back together, somehow, even thousands of miles away he still manages to spread a darkness within my soul whenever I am at my lowest. I hate that he still has this hold on me, one that I cannot shake free.

But I hate more that I let this happen to me. There were so many things that I missed and now it's my fault that I feel like this. I just need to get through this on my own, maintain the illusion that I AM OKAY. Maybe if I tell that to myself enough one day, without me even realising, I'll actually believe it too. The amount of times I fall down is not important, the fact that I push myself back up is what matters. Although that doesn't stop me from feeling disappointed in myself every time I find myself failing to break to the surface.

It would be easier if I could just pretend it never happened - two years of my life that I can definitely live without - but unfortunately, I can't. A vast web of social connections and moments is not something easily untangled and cast aside. Most of my friends are also his friends, so there's no escaping it now. I can't pretend that it was the perfect relationship that I tried so hard to maintain. As the pillar that was my relationship cracked and crumbled back to earth, I never realised just how far away I was until I was helplessly falling through the air.

My mask was taken away from me and I felt so exposed, so vulnerable, so... weak. It's like when you're too lazy to clean your room but you don't want anyone else to discover just how messy you truly are so you just throw everything into your closet and shut the door. This method is all fine and dandy until you never actually fix the mess, preferring to live in ignorance instead as everything continues to pile up, and then you forget how much you've shoved in there after all those years, and then the closet doors finally burst and it all just collapses on top of you, and then you have to wonder how the mess even became this bad to begin with.

Maybe it's the fact that it was my mess this time that scared me so much. Maybe it was that I couldn't simply hide the mess or shove it out of sight. Or maybe it was just the first time I've ever looked and felt so pathetic, so vulnerable. I'm so used to being the strong one, the one who has it all together, the one who never breaks, but it turns out I was just fooling myself. All that time of desperately holding myself together just made me disintegrate into more pieces. However, I can't let people see how much I've fallen apart over something so stupid, something I was too naive and ignorant to see; something I should have stopped long before it started.

Every time I fall, standing will get a little easier, right?

I'm okay.

I'm okay.

I'm okay.

***

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