The Borrowed Brilliance🕯️

People can't be the answers.

They're just more questions.

You can think you've run away from something.

But actually, you've been carrying it with you the whole time.

It's like a haunted house.

Only I am the ghost.

I was never Alyssa's protector. She was mine.

People say moments like this are like ripping off a plaster. The problem is that underneath the plaster, there's still quite a lot of shit.

But sometimes it's easier if you just leave the plaster on.

Sometimes I get so tired that I can't feel my edges anymore.

You can get stuck in a place and not even realise it.

If you're not careful, you can get stuck there forever.

I get these moments when I have to lie down because everything feels, sort of, too much.

And I look up and see the blue or the grey or the black

and I feel myself melting into it.

And for, like, a split second, I feel free and happy.

I used to feel like I knew myself,

But for a while now, I don't think I've been properly in my body.

But no matter how bad life got,

there was always something good.

You had to focus on the good

You can pretend that things aren't your fault...

that you're not a bad person...

you always know that you are.

The problem with a person having a lack of love is that they don't know what it looks like.

So it's easy for them to get tricked, to see things that aren't there.

But then I guess we all lie to ourselves all the time.

A lot of the time, you don't register the important moments in your life as they happen.

You only see that they were important when you look back.

I used to feel like I maybe wasn't real.

Like I was made up of nothing.

But when you fall in love, the nothing feeling is eaten by a something feeling.

which is eaten by an everything feeling.

Being with Alyssa had started to make me feel things.

She made me feel things.

And I didn't like it at all.

Sometimes you realize you had a thing keeping you going that might be a lie...

When you actually really understand that, that the whole thing might have been a lie the whole time... it's like you swallowed a stone.

But not recently. You swallowed it years ago.

Dread can start as a small thing.

It's so quiet, you can pretend not to hear it.

But it gets loud.

Really loud.

And you can't ignore it any more.