#gremlinasis

I've know so many different types of pain, both physical and emotional, but not a single one has been as prominent and enduring as the pain I feel now being exposed to who once was my best friend no longer being so while a different person is taking over the role I filled in their life.

If my friends were not all interconnected I would distance myself because this breaks me every time I see them, but I don't have another place to hide but with myself.

And I am treated as if my hurt is me feeling attacked. I can't understand why it is so hard to see that what I'm experiencing is the worst and most stretched out heartbreak of my life. I no longer am close to the person that is the most important to me. And I fought to avoid it, I did all I could, but at the core I was the one that fucked it up beyond repair. It was me that lost the last chance we would recover and for that I will forever carry anger at myself.

I fucked up the purest thing I had. And no matter how hard I tried I lost it, even worse, I saw it being recovered by the person I fucked my friendship over with.

And while that doesn't make it any less my doing, it makes being around them, being what we once were so much more painful.

Because I'm no more than a bad memory now. Seeing my pain is causing them frustration and it makes me want to hide it but I can't always. Often I'm good enough at it to put on a mask for the necessary time but it falls the second I acknowledge the pain or if it's verbalized to me that the friendship has diminished (and that I have to accept it, as if I haven't by just internalizing my hurt to let them enjoy their time).

I don't know how long I can carry this because this hurt is not weaning. Some mornings I wake up and feel completely taken over by pain and I lose control of my thoughts for hour on end.

So I take walks and I write here and I try to breathe my way out of my pain. But am I not just making it worse by seeing them?

I don't have other places where I don't see them where there isn't some level of intrusion of them in the periphery. So I can only really avoid the pain by being alone or with family that has no link.