JustLikeADream
Favoured Frenzy
For weeks, perhaps a month, I have been exhausting myself trying to hate someone. Trying to forget someone. Trying to convince my heart that turning love into resentment would be easier than carrying its absence. But every attempt leaves me weaker. Hatred is a strange poison. We drink it believing it will burn another person, only to discover it has chosen our own veins as its home. Every day I tried to hate him, I found myself shrinking. Not as I loved him less, but because I was forcing my soul to carry a weight it was never meant to hold.
A few days ago, my body finally rebelled. It began like every other day. Tears. Anxiety arriving in waves. That familiar heaviness settling over my chest as though an invisible hand had reached inside and wrapped itself around my heart. Then came the tremors. The pain did not stab. It mined its way through me, slowly, relentlessly, like a creature digging tunnels beneath the foundations of a house. My hands shook. My vision blurred. My head spun. My body vibrated with a terror that had no face. My breaths became shallow, frantic things. I searched for air as a drowning person searches for the surface. Then suddenly, there was none. No breath. No oxygen. No certainty that my next heartbeat would arrive. I collapsed. There was only darkness approaching. Not darkness as an absence of light, but darkness as a presence. A black hole opening itself before me, patient and silent, stretching its arms as if it had come to collect something that belonged to it.
What frightens me most is not that I saw it. It is that I was not afraid. For a moment, I simply watched it come closer. Then, just before it touched me, breath returned.
A violent gasp. A desperate sigh. The world rushed back. Yet I remained frozen, staring ahead, unable to blink, unable to move, as though part of me had not fully returned. Minutes passed before my body remembered how to be human again. And then it happened again. And again. Day after day. The anxiety returned like a storm that had memorized my address. Yet somewhere beneath all that trembling, beneath the panic and the exhaustion, I understood something.
No one is making me weak. Not him. Not the memories. Not the silence. Not the absence. The frightening truth is that I have been willingly placing my entire being into the hands of someone who was never prepared to hold it the way I wished to be held. Perhaps that is the tragedy of loving deeply. We offer oceans to people carrying only cups. Then we blame the ocean for overflowing. People often tell me I am difficult to handle. Perhaps they are right. I am made of storms and tenderness, contradictions and intensity. Yet I have survived every version of myself. I have held my own trembling hands through nights no one witnessed. I have carried burdens that would have crushed earlier versions of me. If I can hold myself through all of this, why do I keep demanding that another person carry what I have always carried alone?
The more I try to hate him, the more anxious I become. The more I try to erase him, the deeper his shadow settles within me. Because hatred is still attachment. Resentment is still remembrance. To hate someone is merely another way of keeping them alive inside your heart. Perhaps I do not need to hate him. And I do not need to forget him either. As some people are not meant to be erased. They are meant to be accepted as chapters. Not destinations. Not unfinished stories. Just chapters. The wound remains because I keep touching it to see whether it still hurts. And it does. But healing was never going to arrive through hatred. Healing begins when I stop fighting what happened, stop fighting what I felt, and stop fighting the fact that someone could be precious to me and still not belong in my life.
Some loves are not lost because they were unworthy.
Some loves are lost because they were never ours to keep.
And perhaps peace begins the moment we stop trying to turn love into hate, and simply allow it to become a memory.
A few days ago, my body finally rebelled. It began like every other day. Tears. Anxiety arriving in waves. That familiar heaviness settling over my chest as though an invisible hand had reached inside and wrapped itself around my heart. Then came the tremors. The pain did not stab. It mined its way through me, slowly, relentlessly, like a creature digging tunnels beneath the foundations of a house. My hands shook. My vision blurred. My head spun. My body vibrated with a terror that had no face. My breaths became shallow, frantic things. I searched for air as a drowning person searches for the surface. Then suddenly, there was none. No breath. No oxygen. No certainty that my next heartbeat would arrive. I collapsed. There was only darkness approaching. Not darkness as an absence of light, but darkness as a presence. A black hole opening itself before me, patient and silent, stretching its arms as if it had come to collect something that belonged to it.
What frightens me most is not that I saw it. It is that I was not afraid. For a moment, I simply watched it come closer. Then, just before it touched me, breath returned.
A violent gasp. A desperate sigh. The world rushed back. Yet I remained frozen, staring ahead, unable to blink, unable to move, as though part of me had not fully returned. Minutes passed before my body remembered how to be human again. And then it happened again. And again. Day after day. The anxiety returned like a storm that had memorized my address. Yet somewhere beneath all that trembling, beneath the panic and the exhaustion, I understood something.
No one is making me weak. Not him. Not the memories. Not the silence. Not the absence. The frightening truth is that I have been willingly placing my entire being into the hands of someone who was never prepared to hold it the way I wished to be held. Perhaps that is the tragedy of loving deeply. We offer oceans to people carrying only cups. Then we blame the ocean for overflowing. People often tell me I am difficult to handle. Perhaps they are right. I am made of storms and tenderness, contradictions and intensity. Yet I have survived every version of myself. I have held my own trembling hands through nights no one witnessed. I have carried burdens that would have crushed earlier versions of me. If I can hold myself through all of this, why do I keep demanding that another person carry what I have always carried alone?
The more I try to hate him, the more anxious I become. The more I try to erase him, the deeper his shadow settles within me. Because hatred is still attachment. Resentment is still remembrance. To hate someone is merely another way of keeping them alive inside your heart. Perhaps I do not need to hate him. And I do not need to forget him either. As some people are not meant to be erased. They are meant to be accepted as chapters. Not destinations. Not unfinished stories. Just chapters. The wound remains because I keep touching it to see whether it still hurts. And it does. But healing was never going to arrive through hatred. Healing begins when I stop fighting what happened, stop fighting what I felt, and stop fighting the fact that someone could be precious to me and still not belong in my life.
Some loves are not lost because they were unworthy.
Some loves are lost because they were never ours to keep.
And perhaps peace begins the moment we stop trying to turn love into hate, and simply allow it to become a memory.