Trust me, and take my hand...

...when the lights go out, you will understand.


I've never been good at trusting.  Scratch that, it's easily one of the biggest lies I've told in quite a while.  I used to be really good at it.  At meeting someone and opening up instantly.  Pathetic as it sounds, I think I liked to think of myself as a flower--suddenly blooming once someone took the time to talk to me.  That's a valid analogy to describe it, although the parallel to a flower couldn't be more inaccurate.

The things you find out about me when I open up are never pretty.  They're broken and twisted and crooked.  I'll talk about old relationships and rules I broke way back then like they're nothing.  That's not what you seen when you really get past the walls.  I don't think anybody has made their way in recently.  Not far enough to see the scars anyway.

I may have alluded to things unintentionally in my conversations with people--the issues I believe in most firmly are, predictably enough, the ones that are closest to me.  But the things you don't see until I really open up are the scars.  Especially the ones that aren't physical, the ones that I can trace the effects of on my soul.

Let me give you an analogy.  Has this ever happened to you?  You have a sore spot, maybe it's a bruise or a cut, or just something that hurts for some reason, or...even a better example, a sore, knotted muscle in your back.  And when you press down on it, or touch it in some weird way you wouldn't normally, you feel a shiver or a tingle or a pain going a great distance through your body, sometimes so far as to affect an entirely unrelated place.  It's an awfully weird feeling.

Even weirder, when it's not a physical thing.  But that's how all of my scars play out.  You say one thing and it reminds me of something I said three years ago, which bounces back and pulls at something in me in a way that makes me unable to place the hurt.  Especially because I know it's no longer relevant...but it still hurts.

Sometimes I wish I was brave enough to strike up a conversation with some of the people I've left behind.  Just to see how (or if) they've changed.  Just to find out if I was right or wrong for avoiding them or ignoring them, or getting myself as far away as I could (mostly the latter).  Maybe one day I will.  We'll see.