The Hiding Place

by C.J. Tudor

“Good, better, best. Never let it rest. Till your good is better and your better is best.”

“Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.”

you can still feel the echoes of bad things. They imprint on the fabric of our reality, like a footprint in concrete. Whatever made the impression is long gone, but you can never erase the mark it left.

People say time is a great healer. They’re wrong. Time is simply a great eraser. It rolls on and on regardless, eroding our memories, chipping away at those great big boulders of misery until there’s nothing left but sharp little fragments, still painful but small enough to bear.

Broken hearts don’t mend. Time just takes the pieces and grinds them to dust.

If newspapers are the place where facts become stories, the Internet is the place where stories become conspiracy theories.

That’s the problem with life. It never gives you a heads-up. Never offers you even the slightest clue that this might be an important moment. You might want to take some time, drink it in. It never lets you know that something is worth holding on to until it’s gone.

We’re all too busy, too distracted by the sheer effort of getting through each day—working, paying the bills, the mortgage, shopping—that we don’t want to look deeper. We don’t dare. We want things to be fine. To be “hunky-dory.” Because we simply haven’t got the mental energy to deal with it if they’re not. It’s only when something bad happens, something irretrievable, that we see things properly. And then it’s too late.

Grief is personal. It isn’t something you can share, like a box of chocolates. It is yours and yours alone. A spiked steel ball chained to your ankle. A coat of nails around your shoulders. A crown of thorns. No one else can feel your pain. They cannot walk in your shoes because your shoes are full of broken glass and every time you try and take a step forward it rips your soles to bloody shreds. Grief is the worst kind of torture and it never ends. You have dibs on that dungeon for the rest of your life.

You might not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can definitely judge the person who owns the book.

memories become soft over time. As malleable as putty in our minds—we can shape them into anything we want.

the dead never really leave us. We carry them inside. In everything we do. In our dreams, our nightmares. The dead are a part of us. And maybe they are part of something else too. This place. This earth.

Happiness is overrated; it’s far too short-lived, for a start. If you bought it on Amazon, you’d demand a refund. Broke after a month and impossible to fix. Next time will try misery—apparently that shit lasts forever.

shadows are never just shadows. They are the deepest part of the darkness. And the deepest part of the darkness is where the monsters hide.