Sarah Schabs

Yet, I’m still laying here with my eyes watering in a language you cannot read. You get upset when I say I don’t feel worthy of your love.

You make me happy. So much I can’t form the words within my trembling breaths. But I still have residual sadness. I’m sorry nothing makes sense when I tell you I can’t shake certain things, or unfeel certain things, or that “your past stays with you”.

You tell me you love me over and over and that I have nothing to worry about and I believe every word. But my past still stays. It lingers.

I told you that you have my whole heart and that wasn’t a lie. I’m just sorry you cannot understand the darkest parts of it, that a broken heart put back together again still has little cracks where the smallest of pieces were swept by the wind.

Don’t you see why I don’t feel I deserve someone as wonderful as you? You have to realize one thing about broken people. It’s not that you’re doing a bad job making me feel my worth. It’s not that since we’re happy and in love I’m fixed and can now forget everything before you.

It’s just that the sadness lingers. It will always linger deep inside me. And I cry because I fear the day you realize I can’t be fixed, or even understood. I fear one day all your beautiful effort will make you too tired to keep it up. I fear one day it will drive you away…even when you stay.

I don’t want you to forget that the bad things that caused me pain are a big part of why I’m the person you love today. And that the scars heal a little more each day. I just need your patience, my love.

I was never good at coming home to a cold bed in winter and closing my eyes to the daylight.

There's something about being up at night that makes you forget that yesterday passed.

And that's why I was never good at remembering much of us.

Like how I never closed my eyes those forgotten nights or ever woke up to check another day off my calendar.

All I realized in the cold mornings was that you were gone and there were scrapes on my arms in your place.

As if it all happened to me in my sleep.

And I was never good at knowing the difference between a dream and a foggy night.

That's the reason I'm not sure of much anymore.

Like if the pieces of me I left in you are really gone.

I was a mirror that tipped over and I leaked pieces of glass everywhere I went. I was a wine bottle that shattered and left small cuts on the people who came near me. I told them stop where they were. But their feet bled as I said my apologies.

Let’s say all of the collected pain from our entire lives were materialized. Let’s say what haunted us most was stuffed into a cardboard box. Oh, the things I would do to my own. Oh, the ways I would find to destroy it.

I’d sail it out to sea and not even say goodbye. No. I’d set fire to its edges and watch it fray and burn. Actually, I’d shoot it with a gun. I would not stop until I ran out of bullets. No matter what, I would make sure to scream into it. Tell it how much it almost killed me all those times, right before I taped it up and tossed it over a bridge.

How quickly we would permanently evict our pain if only we could pick it up and feel it and hold it in our hands. But our pain are our memories and why do our minds take it back over and over again with open arms? Why do we find it a place to sit and stay and tell us its stories repeatedly until we are pulverized? Why do we shield it and protect it and never let it go even when we think we let things go? We lie there barely breathing as we call it a reminder, a lesson. As if we don’t owe it to ourselves to forget for good.