The Other Side

by Kim Holden

Every Friday night I survey the crowd, like I am right now. Most guys look for shallow attraction on the outside; I look for deep devastation on the inside, so brutal it seeps out.

I’m a creature of habit, a fan of routine.

Guilt and me, we’re conjoined. One. When it isn’t stabbing me, I drag it around like a ball and chain.

She’s one of those people who’s oblivious to how the rest of the world views her. Blissfully unaware that she’s the butt of jokes and constantly mocked. I admire her ability to tune it all out.

nothing obliterates the outside world like surrendering all senses to the depths of a kiss.

“I like being outside, it feels like possibility. Especially at night, because in the dark we’re all the same…”

If you’re right, you don’t yell about it until you’re red in the face and someone believes you. Volume doesn’t change minds, it closes them.),

sometimes what you consider logical isn’t. It’s tunnel vision and fixation and it makes everyone else around you miserable.”

“The most important time to listen is when words are missing, that’s when hearts cry out the loudest.”

She grew up used to expecting the worst out of life, and the worst continued to find her.

“Every kiss eventually ends. The memory of them doesn’t. I’ll still feel that one when I’m ninety,”

people are layered and if you don’t care, if you don’t get to know them, if you don’t question, you can’t peel back the layers and find out what’s deeper. And when your outer layer is entirely made up of asshole, no one digs deeper to see the depression just underneath. The depression and the asshole are explicably linked—cause and effect.

(Seeing Hell on Earth has all but stripped away any faith I was raised with, because what kind of God would allow that kind of suffering to exist?),

“Some people aren’t worth fighting for, Toby. You’re not one of them. There are people we meet in this life who anchor us. They reassure us with their presence. They bring us comfort simply by being. They love by osmosis, radiating it out and diffusing it in effortlessly. Quietly, they walk among us, treading lightly but providing stability and influence because it’s second nature. The thing that’s so special about these people is that they don’t even know they’re doing it.”

“Holding it in gives it power, Toby. Talking about it takes that power away.”

You think your family is there no matter what. But no matter what is conditional and it has a time limit.