The pain of it all could not even be imagined by the most empathetic onlooker. Who was the stranger who had cut me in half and abandoned me by the road? Every trace of her had been removed, every fibre, every atom and yet I could still feel her there – overshadowing every thought and every feeling. Had I been cut by this stranger, or did I just rip away at myself from the inside out; clawing away to escape from the self-imposed drudgery of my everyday existence? Was it possible to inflict these wounds on my own?
I had held her heart in my very hands, and as much as I wanted to merge it with my own; our aortas entangled like vines swinging from the boughs of strangled trees, I let it fall away into the dust of nothingness. Cursed by the weight of uncertainty and my inclination towards virtuosity, I tossed it away into the burning emptiness, as though it meant nothing.
If she had held the knife which cut me in two, I wouldn’t have blamed her for wielding it. Maybe she should have done a better job at cutting herself out of my bleeding soul. An exorcism, slicing away at the burden of a thousand imagined terrors. Would it really have been so bad just to love me?
Instead she held the knife above herself; she took one look at the scars on her thighs – her punishments for the misdeeds of others, and she reopened her wounds. Each and every one of them. The blade of the knife traced the lines of old and made them new once again. The warmth of the blood dripping down the tops of her thighs. Her own private hell and salvation. There are only so many times that a wound can be reopened before it refuses to heal.
If we had never met, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. But who exactly is that person? And is that person worth all of this sorrow? I only ever wanted to be her secret, the way that she is still mine.
Writer's Block by Marijka Bright 