You Promised Yourself

YOU PROMISED yourself in words that you would unpack, lay out all that you had collected and bear them open for the world to see. So why is the dust on the attic stairs undisturbed? Why are the boxes still full, laughing at all that you can’t let go?

You almost did it, almost handed one box over, almost spread its contents before his feet. But fear is a powerful thing, beating beating beating at you until your lungs give and your legs collapse. The words hang over your head in sympathy.

Knees ache where they are pressed to the jagged floor and eyes tear up as they glue to the shadows in the box you hold so tightly to your chest. You cannot get up, cannot push your feet to shift beneath you because you have failed. Failed failed failed. The shadows taunt you with your own words, with his face until you are blinded to everything but how it should have played out.
The sharp edges of the box cuts deep deep deep, through skin and muscle, bone and lungs and heart until the corner sits in the cavity meant to pump life throughout you. Still, how do you let go, relinquish, unlock all that has built in the silence you’ve smothered yourself in?

You promised yourself. Promised promised promised, in words, again and again and again.

You hate that words have harmed you, hate that promises strike you as they break. But look, right here, not even you yourself can hold up the promise you’ve designed. Words had often been your weapon, your shield, but they have turned on you – a double agent, answering your calls for aid all the while answering to the ones that have hurt you. You cannot trust them.

Instead you fill your head with pounding, with metal on metal, hammer on nail - hopes smashed in the crossfire. Wood comes together in the floating space, completed with a see-through barrier. You have built a window between you and words, are now watching them from the safety of inch-thick glass, from purple expectations that burrow within their syllables. Unfortunately, your intimacy with them leaves you feeling empty on the other side. Sometimes you lean in so close that the glass wavers, blurring the words that would change you most. It is a bittersweet deferment that sends you aching aching aching.

Sometimes through the fog that saves you from those words, you find yourself tapping on the glass where you are held suspended by your loneliness, weighed down by the weightlessness of curved weapons that once dripped from the pen you have allowed to dry. You have to reach out. The birds you released from their cages circle the window, not understanding how their freedom meant your entrapment. Because you are. Trapped. The window has become your prison door and you have forced forced forced words to be your prison guards. The tapping echoes out echoes out echoes out and through the window pane you see them turn to where you stand surrounded by boxes. You do not hear the cacophony that erupts on the other side – they have missed you. But their sound still ring ring rings in the hollow space carved out by their betrayal. Trust is a word that bashes violently against this new barrier, every strike a tinkling noise lacing through the glass with pin pricks of something that feels like fear, something that alters and bends into panic.

You promised yourself.

Your wrists have dried, scarred things that they are, hanging heavy at your side.  What do you do now, with boxes on your chest, clean feet, dusty stairs, dried up veins, and a window that restrains you from your only defense? How do you promise without words? How does flesh break? It doesn’t, you are tearing instead. Remember remember remember the light of the dark; the victory in miles, in places, in comfort born of purging. Where have you gone?  You are drowning on the dust of untouched things. You have hidden yourself from the moon, from four letters and one syllable, from the thing that KNOWS you. You wrote Todays yesterday, wrote them wings to soar, but now you have decided that Future must also take wing, leaving you before you can see its face. This is your flaw. You have let the fear beat you beat you beat you, trap you trap you trap you, until all you see is twisted grins and malevolent intent aimed at ripping you apart.

And you sleep on it and sleep on it and sleep on it. You’ve traveled, but you buried it in Past. WHERE ARE YOU! Breathe! Bleed! You must, you need, you are dying. Words hover, orbit, circle, waiting and waiting and waiting and they will never stop. They know you too.

Suddenly, you realize you have never been more angry at Submission than right now within shrinking walls and massing pasts that tape their lids closed no matter how many times you pry them open. You’ve never been more angry at yourself, at the silence and serenity of an un-beating heart than you are now staring at your reflection in the window. The pen calls you, a feint ghost of what you had been, built and dyed with what you are now; but the words, the ink of the future is stained on the syllables you have veiled yourself from. Those letters that you bled are now scraps beneath your feet; you find that their torn edges and fractured beings cut you far deeper than the whole had. Yet there still remains an absence of ink to consummate the wound. Not even blood bothers to well.

“Bleed!” you scream you scream you scream. The words still circle, they haven’t left you. “Break… please!”

The pounding of crinkled, dried fists do nothing – the box is in the way. You need to get out, because you know now, you hate that you know, but you know, that words are neutral, un-opinionated things that love to be loved to be used to be captured. You can love a word, cherish it, weaponize it, but so can another.

“Dammit! LET ME OUT!” you cry you cry you cry. You were promised. You did promise.

Anger is a new color to this white room. Anger is a clenched fist without blood, without ink, but with passion enough to throw away the box clenched to your chest, to bend down, to draw up the empty inkwell, the empty pen and drive its tip into the glass. Over and over and over again and again and again. Neutral is your new rock – a word decorated in a kaleidoscope of colors and emotions that, shit, right now you just can’t sort through. Because you need OUT! You can’t think about the fact that dust has coated your lungs, that you’ve starved yourself of light, that even real darkness has not touched your skin since the presence of that window. And you scream in frustration because you don’t know how to make yourself bleed again. Words are throwing around their syllables, 4… 5… 6… 7…, against the glass, trying so hard to free you. They haven’t left a single scratch.

The pen, mighty thing that it is, simply bounces off the window, chiming in your clenched fist at its abuse. So you turn, all weightlessness, hopelessness, emptiness and falling expletives, and you search the white that is black, that is red, that is green. All you see are boxes, all you see are nightmares and heartaches, breaking points that you’ve captured and hidden. In a howl of rage you tear at them, tear as you are being torn, throwing out the contents until the blankness of the room is filled with the things that terrify you. Once every box has been laid to waste, you freeze, close your eyes, bottle your breathes, square your shoulders and raise your pen. You have no words to stand beside you, all you have is this resounding thunder in your veins that burns like manic on your tongue. You open your eyes, focus on the monster that’s formed before you.

“I promised these words,” you say you say you say. And then you lung.