How To Know It's Bad Again, A List ll

                 1. Sleep has become like a distant dream and even when you do sleep, it never feels like its enough. The nightmares are so bad most nights that you stay awake till your eyes are burning and your head is pounding. You used to always sleep with some sort of light on, even if it was just the TV screen flashing pictures at you because you didn't like the way the sound was reverberating inside your chest cavity. No, sleep feels nonexistent to you, even when you actually do get some because in the morning you always wake up feeling more exhausted than you did when you crawled back into bed that previous night. 

2. You've given up on showers, though not entirely now you just sit in the tub until the steaming hot water gets ice cold and even then it's almost impossible to bargain with yourself to get out. Though by the time you do your fingers are pruny and your entire body is shaking because you forced yourself to sit in that ice cold water for hours because no matter how hard you try your body never feels clean of their grimy touch. 

3. Everything is to soft, everything you love is to soft. It's as if everything you own will always be possessed by their touch and it's to soft to be that touch. You crave something gentle and soft, yet it terrifies and breaks you at the same time because they never learned how to be gentle or soft with you. The bruises they left scattered across your body have finally healed, though it seems so strange to see a body clean of their touch; though it's not entirely clean because it takes 7 years for someone's touch to be entirely erased from your body's chemistry and it's only been 4 months since they last touched you. 

4. You left everything behind because it seemed no matter where you went there they were. As if they knew you were going to be there and you haven't felt safe in years, that word. Safe. It has become a foreign language on your tongue, you've forgotten what that word means. The last time you felt safe, well it's been years. It makes you question yourself, how could you have fallen for someone who took that away from you? The people who love you are supposed to make you feel safe, not insane! How had you entirely missed the difference between those two things, they're nothing alike and yet somehow you mistook your slow circle into insanity for the feeling of safety while they littered your body with bruises.

5. You've been going through the different stages of grief and it's so hard for your exhausted brain to make sense of it because you haven't lost someone in so long; yet what your neglecting to remember is you've lost so much in these last 2 1/2 years not by your own doing, but by theirs. They of course never let you feel those losses because "it was for your own good". The biggest thing you're missing though my dear, is yourself. The person you lost somewhere along the way. You used to be so full of life and enthralled by any adventure it would drag you into, now it takes all of your energy to pull yourself out of bed in the mornings and that person you used to be is the loss you are grieving the most. 

6. You threw out all the pictures of them and yet somehow they still keeping showing up everywhere, you keep begging for it to end. Though you've yet to set fire to a single thing, which is how you've always learned to let go of every other past lover. Erase their memory in a flame because as violent as fire is, it is somehow cleansing of your soul and it always helps to bring around the fire back into your soul. That fire that burns so brightly inside you and makes your eyes sparkle, the fire inside your soul that brings your laughter back and reminds that even through all the pain and trauma, you can always make it to the other side. 

7. You hold yourself underwater almost every time you take a bath, testing the limit of how long you can hold your breath before it's your last. You don't really want to die, you just want to be someone different; you keep telling yourself that if you can break that hold they have on you by forcing yourself to be reborn in a watery grave that maybe, just maybe you can walk away an entirely different woman. Though the thing you keep missing, darling is that you were already a different woman from the moment your name crossed their lips that very first night, you were different. 

8. You're petrified to go the water's edge, the one place that used to be your safe haven feels like a crime scene because it was at the water's edge you almost signed your own death certificate by saying yes to your abuser. You hate yourself for that because out of all the things they took from you, it makes you loathe their entire existence for taking away your safe haven though you should loathe yourself as well because it was your fault to begin with, right? Of course not, you are not to blame. You have no reason to hate yourself because it wasn't until it was almost to late that you realized the devil had played you a fool parading around as an angel. 

These things take time, my love. The process of healing, you know they left more than just physical wounds. Those wounds, the ones unseen by the naked eye, those are the ones that hurt the most and take the longest to heal. Do not isolate yourself, darling because those are the wounds that will never heal if you do. Go, live your life, learn to find the person you lost, learn to love them again. 

Heal loudly! Heal however you need, sweet. Always remember it's okay not to be okay, but at some point my dear you have to get up off the bathroom floor, wipe away the tears, dust off your knees and take on the world; heart on your sleeve and all! 

You can always do this, you will never be weak! You are strong, you are a warrior, so dear one fix your crown and walk tall, always♥