Don’t Look Into My Eyes

The eyes have it – the reader to the soul, every emotion laid bare, every nuance – whether truth or lie – there to be seen. To be read. So don’t look into my eyes. Leave my soul alone. Stay out! I will cover my eyes with dark glass, with coloured contact lenses – I will look away when you lift yours to mine.

I want my pain to be mine alone – I do not share this, it’s mine; I want to bathe in it until it has shredded me into the pieces that I deserve to be.

It’s not guilt, it’s not shame, not regret –  it’s not any of those silly things. It is only pain, my pain, my time to suffer. It happens to everyone, and they all say ‘tell me about it’ or ‘I’m here for you’ or ‘let me know if you …’ – I don’t want these things. I want to be alone with it, to get right to the bottom of the pit and lie there and feel it – utterly and completely, become one with it.

If I don’t do this, it will keep coming back, it will torment me for the rest of my life. How do I know this?

Because that is where it came from.

I was tough – on the outside. I pulled through, didn’t let anyone know what was in there. Some, a very few, kept close but didn’t interfere. On rare occasions, they said words that kept me chained to this life, kept me out there, to put one foot in front of the other, to keep going.

So I didn’t deal with it then – in either sense. I didn’t delve into it and bury myself in it, and I didn’t ‘talk it out’ like they do now (it wasn’t the done thing then, you know – you just had to ‘pull up your socks’ etc.). I hid from it. So it comes back.

For a while, it was the anniversary of the event. Then it became the anniversary of several aspects that led up to the event. Now, it seems to be every month (more deeply felt emotions bleed out during the full moon, you know). And the only way to deal with it is to close my eyes, feel every cut and thrust, cry every tear that needs to escape into the river of loss, and remember.

Do you remember? Do you go back there? Is the pain any less for the years that pass?

Not for me.

But today, I will share the pain – a little. Next month, I will speak of it to test the theory that words spoken aloud can ease the freeze on my heart. It is not hope, it is action. A plan. To remember, and to take the basket of that memory with me as a picture, not as a wound.