Sarah O'Connor

Do you know what it’s like when everything is heavy? When you can feel that pit open up inside of you? When it gnaws and consumes and opens up all those vulnerable parts you try to hide away. All those parts you bury so that you don’t have to be hurt.

I’ve gotten good at hiding things, at finding ways to stop the hurt.

But here’s the thing, you can always be hurt. Things can be dug up, things can be trampled, things can be destroyed. Well, maybe not destroyed, even if it feels like that in some way right now. Not that things can’t be destroyed, just that I don’t think I am yet even though it feels like I’m leaking out, even though I want to scream.

I was happy today.

It’s strange how in minutes happiness can leave, how disappointment weighs and lingers

But instead all you have is that hole, that gaping pit where everything falls through, that threatens to suck you down. Not that it’s far below in yourself, not in your stomach  or feet. No, the pit is in your chest, somewhere beside your heart, nestled safe between the lungs. Safe from everything but ready to destroy at the slightest tap.

Okay maybe not destroy, or maybe it is destroy. Okay it’s not but again it’s starting to feel like that, this crumbling thing, like I’m some statue threatening to turn into dust. The face is all flat and gone with the weather, the limbs smoothed and nubbed. You would walk right by her, think she might just be another lump of rock, another piece of the scenery to ignore.

I don’t like this hurt. And my first instinct is to start filling that pit, burying the hole, burying the hurt with all the other past hurts that have festered and fermented and infected my bloodstream. But I know that isn’t right, hasn’t been right for a long time.

The only other option is to open the pit wider, to scream and yell and hope that that will stop the crumbling even if it will feel like crumbling while it’s happening. To be vulnerable, breakable, and trust that the right people will keep me whole.

But I don’t know how to be that person, how to let myself bleed so openly. To show my wounded tattered self and expect someone not to create more wounds, to put me lower.

There is no easy way to this. It’s either be numb or feel, be safe or be hurt. And slowly I’ll learn how to open that pit, to hurt. But who knows how long that will be.