![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
June has come in with a heaviness that I didn’t quite understand until I remembered that this was the month of my homecoming. Painful things leave their marks on us, even as we rise above them. I don’t talk about that year much. I am still unable to speak of it out loud most of the time and only a few people closest to me know how bleak it really was, how hopeless, how full of cruelties and hard places.
I don’t regret that time, but it did leave a tender place in me that seems not to heal. Nor is it about lingering love or feelings for a man who didn’t love me. He’s on the periphery of what still aches in me, just as he really was in all that I did to myself in his name. What lingering sadness is housed in my bones comes from the memory of how easily I gave myself away, how quick I was to discount my own value. The memory of it in my flesh is visceral, as if I’d approached the edge of a tall building and leaped off it without a single thought to my own wellbeing. Jump. A whisper. Jump. The fall lasted for months. The impact came hard and swift, accompanied by the pictures of a stranger fingering her cunt in his email. Accompanied by his pretending he had no wife. I look at the dates on the exchange between them. Eighteen days after we were married. Jump. Every day is muffled by the sound of rushing wind in my ears. Jump. All I can think of on the way down is how quickly I let go of myself, how little value I had when it should have mattered. Not to him, but to me. I never want to do that again.
The story does have a happy ending, of course. After I hit the ground, I began to crawl home. Somewhere about midpoint, riding in the car with Amanda and smoking cigarettes until our throats were raw from nicotine and laughing, I realized that my spirit had never left me. I limped into my little house, empty for a few days until the movers followed with my things, and I knew that I had survived what many would not have as soon as I breathed in the familiar scent of home. Every day is a gift, but June came in heavy and reminded me exactly why.
( To remind me... )
I don’t regret that time, but it did leave a tender place in me that seems not to heal. Nor is it about lingering love or feelings for a man who didn’t love me. He’s on the periphery of what still aches in me, just as he really was in all that I did to myself in his name. What lingering sadness is housed in my bones comes from the memory of how easily I gave myself away, how quick I was to discount my own value. The memory of it in my flesh is visceral, as if I’d approached the edge of a tall building and leaped off it without a single thought to my own wellbeing. Jump. A whisper. Jump. The fall lasted for months. The impact came hard and swift, accompanied by the pictures of a stranger fingering her cunt in his email. Accompanied by his pretending he had no wife. I look at the dates on the exchange between them. Eighteen days after we were married. Jump. Every day is muffled by the sound of rushing wind in my ears. Jump. All I can think of on the way down is how quickly I let go of myself, how little value I had when it should have mattered. Not to him, but to me. I never want to do that again.
The story does have a happy ending, of course. After I hit the ground, I began to crawl home. Somewhere about midpoint, riding in the car with Amanda and smoking cigarettes until our throats were raw from nicotine and laughing, I realized that my spirit had never left me. I limped into my little house, empty for a few days until the movers followed with my things, and I knew that I had survived what many would not have as soon as I breathed in the familiar scent of home. Every day is a gift, but June came in heavy and reminded me exactly why.
( To remind me... )