Does It Hurt?

by H.D. Carlton

“People don’t actually care about fixing you. They just want to shape your broken pieces until they fit their standards.

“Where did you get this?” he asks, wiggling the book and ignoring me. “The bookshelf. It's a shelf that you put books on,” I clip. “Where did you get your audacity?”

“I don’t want your apologies. It’s men that made you feel and think that way. They should be apologizing to you.” “Are you going to apologize? You're one of those men.”

After the shipwreck, I had told her that she was weak. But I realize now that I was wrong. Being scared and weak aren't synonymous. It takes strength to keep getting back up after constantly being knocked down.

You’re so much more than the people who have hurt you.”

Enzo and I—we’re not very compatible, I think. We speak different languages most days, and it’s a constant battle of figuring each other out. But when we’re stripped of our clothes and our bodies are doing the talking, we understand each other as if God was never angry with humans and separated us by the way we move our tongues.

We built our tower to Heaven, but God is angry again, and once more, we’re speaking different languages.

“That won't happen, either. I don't think you're ready to die.” I shake my head. He's wrong. I've been ready. I've just been too stubborn to give up doing the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Live.

He was never raised in an environment that showed him unconditional love and warmth, so the hole in his chest only deepened. “You felt like a burden,” I surmise. “I didn’t know how to be anything else,” he states plainly.

Whoever created the word goodbye never knew loss. There’s nothing good about the way he leaves me.

Love is funny that way. It persists even when you’ve done everything in your power to banish it. It demands its own voice and refuses to be a slave to anyone but its own desires. And despite the power of it, those selfish desires are what make love so weak. It’s accepting the apologies of a cheating lover. It’s returning to a raised hand, over and over, until that hand becomes lethal, and home is in the afterlife. It’s clinging to a mother who never wanted you and hoping she will one day show up on those church steps. It’s grabbing ahold of a hand that belongs to both a father and an abuser, wailing as they slowly slip away. It’s falling in love with a liar, a thief, and praying they never hurt you again.