Not Enough... You're Not Enough for me...
Those words spilled out like broken pearls... they fell across my shoulders, down my eyes.... broke me open slowly...a long crack to the hollow empty silence...
Like dead sails in that pale winter room.
My tongue was stuck.... paralyzed by the vast enormity of those 5 velvet hammer words.
My heart stopped...the clockwork jammed.... the sluggish stammer of its faulty drum, suddenly ringing so loud it seemed to cloud my vision.
Silence .....like shattered dreams.... a dusty nursery of them.... sand for the wind to blow away...
The next hours, days and weeks are stunned heaviness. A labored effort to move limbs, process thought... molasses days of shock and hurt and emptiness.
The pain, the destruction so utter, I honestly thought, for months afterward, that I'd karmically screwed up my life so completely, failed at Love and relationships so entirely, I worried I’d die in some freak accident like a reset flush button of the gods. I had horrific daydreams of it.
It took 10 years for the slow kintsugi meshing back together of these chipped parts of me, but felt more like gum wrapper foil than gold.
Frayed, warped strands of me were unraveled from the fabric I knew, and the raw, ugly remains gathered to be rewoven into a new pattern.... the bent strands stiff, bruised...and weak to bend in a new weft.
I have never been the same.
10 years to realize it was manipulation, projection and fear from him, not an honest label. Not real. Just control and feeding on my hurt. Those words seared into me like a brand, a bell tolled, that echoed across the past and future traumas of my life.
Desperate introspection....turning faded pages over and over, dizzy, trying to find meaning and failing, confused and reeling, vertigo instead of healing. Maybe it was a necessary gift.... that pain. A tempering. Then spaceless time...
This fragile, tenderly repaired fabric of me, given a new blackened hull, to weather the toxic family storms to come. The funerals. The loss, the deceit. The betrayal. My barometer for tolerance refocused, sharper and easier to walk away from what harms me. My foundation stronger for the charring.
New chapters, new someones, new lenses, showed me new filters to see goodness, and a higher vantage point to look back to see manipulation and damaged, twisted communication. Deception instead of the surface shine of bright lights and "always"....even from family.
But still.... arms length.... uncertain... always connected....lost and found...
and almost....
always almost....
I realize now.... after more unraveling, I’ve never since, felt like I belonged anywhere....keenly aware of the teetering sea-leg sense of not having the safety of "home", a place or a person to know was solid footing...... not that I could have, but that had me.
No more safety of amber porch lights at dusk to go home to, through the trees.
Never felt like I truly felt safe or accepted enough to trust I could relax as part of a group, a tribe, a couple. That's not built from one incident, but many in all the different circles of my life.
Miriades of paper cuts ..... a favorite book left out on the deck when everyone went happily in to dinner.
There are days where those moments of connection shine bright and rare and true, like sun on the ocean.... and then they're gone....and I'm left, after the laughter and smiles.... alone.... little abandonments....with the quiet, steady refrigerator hum and this delicate, frayed, cracked-china heart... I stood silent, afraid I became what I feared most about others. Closed off. Unfeeling.
The airlock sealed. Fortress of solitude. Getting back to work..... and hoping for ..... more bright days.
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