Someone said “oh, remember the Japanese earthquake?”, and bam.
I looked back, and I drowned.
I remember the 2011 Japanese earthquake. Mostly because my ex — who was, perhaps, not my ex at that point, but how much I ever truly knew about what was going on in that relationship I don’t know — was in Tokyo at the time, and my first reaction was my heart leaping into my throat and starting to shake. I remember DMing her and asking frantically if she was okay.
I got a generic “lol I’m fine” answer on her Twitter, addressed to everyone. I felt like an absolute idiot.
I was an idiot, to be fair.
She’s not the only one with a supposed steel-trap memory. I remember every knife she shoved into me, and I remember pulling each one of them out and bleeding a little more each time.
The rapist just hurt my body and psychological health. She destroyed my fucking heart and soul.
I think that, but I know my heart is dead. I can’t fall in love. I can’t trust. And yes, I do blame her. Because she did it.
Not even venting makes any of it better. I’m half a person because people I loved tore chunks off me, watched as the empty spaces grew, and then decided I was too hard to deal with while I bled out.
And I’m ‘bitter’ and ‘dwelling’ whenever it slaps me in the face out of nowhere. I’m a ‘dead star’.
So what? I’ll fill the dead spaces with stars and poetry and music and magic and faeries and colours and light and lace and spikes. I’ll paper over the bitterness with patches of chintz and damask and spidersilk. I’ll patch the holes in my heart and soul and lock the doors to them both.
Maybe I’ll never be able to think back on it without feeling fucking stupid and nauseous, but hey, you take what you can get. Maybe by some miracle I’ll learn to forget.
I breathed in, and I drowned. My hands were trembling as I held them to my face…to try and catch my tears? To halt them and send them back to where they came from? Not possible, not possible any more. I looked back, and now I was drowning. It served me right. I knew I shouldn’t have done so.
But I think I knew, even if it was just at the back of my mind, that the ocean that threatened to pull me under if I looked too hard into its depths was always there. I could never have forgotten entirely, I could only have taught myself not to think about her, not ever. And now, now I’d have to start it all over again, learning not to poke and prod at any old memory that surfaced, and question that could be swimming in the depths. It had to become a knee-jerk reaction once again. The ocean could drown. It was more powerful than I ever could dream to be. I couldn’t stand up to it or face it down. The only option was nothing. No remembering. No thinking. No cherry blossoms.