Stranger, Do You Know?

Stranger, do you know what it feels like?

To hold an ocean of sadness in your chest, unable to let anyone know you’re drowning under sudden, swollen waves of madness?
To feel a pain so paralyzing, it numbs your nerves and strangles your throat so slowly that you don’t even feel it until one day you realize you’re starved dead of oxygen?

Do you know what it feels like?
To bite your tongue raw till your teeth draw blood behind that smile you paint so robotically for others?
To scratch bitten nails against palms till your tender skin is burning with red roads, leaving behind cold evidence of your painful helplessness?

Do you know what it feels like?
To slide down a bathroom wall, your breath clawing your lungs sore, while a sob stays a prisoner in your throat, your anxious fingers twisting a hole in your shirt?
To see your reflection in the mirror bend and swim through the tears that cling in mute agony to your eyelashes?
To feel like you might never breathe again, and being okay with it, because your’re so truly exhausted with the sheer heaviness of existing as a human in this cruel world?

Do you ever wish to rip the thoughts from your head?
Do you ever wish to be some place far, to be someone, anyone but yourself in that moment?
Do you ever feel the permanence of pain so strongly that you wonder if there’s an end?
If there’s light?
If there’s any point at all?

​

Because stranger,
If you know what it feels like, then take my hand, clasp it tight till my finger tips go white and let me show you I’m there for you. Broken, but there. Always there.
To understand one’s suffering and continuing to watch them suffer, might be one of the greatest sins I will commit.

So take my hand as a sort of hope and wounded compassion, crashing through the layers of desolation that have built around you. May you feel heard, because I know how silently torture can make itself be felt. I know how you’re turning the people you love against yourself day by day.
Let me be there for you, I beg you.
I understand you, and it’s okay if you can’t believe me when I say that, for I know pain hardens a soul and ravages the purest of hearts.

I guess I could be telling you how utterly mortal our life is, how infinitely small the time given to us is.
I could be telling you to go out there and grab all the fragments of happiness you can, how fleeting moments are, how truly special people can be even though they’re temporary and never ours to keep and how beautiful the world actually is and how much love and kindness flows within and around us but you won’t hear me will you? You won’t hear me even if I scream and tell you how goddamn rare and precious you are and how pure people can be if you allow them.

So, just take my hand.
It may not be a lot, it may not be enough even, but it will be something.

I hope to god it will be something.