• It’s the moment where you’re not sure if the lump in your throat is a cough or a cry you’re stifling.

    It’s how you can’t quite tell if that weakness in your knees is a thousand years of starvation and days missing sleep or your entire being collapsing into an empty vessel of release.
    Of giving up.

    It’s the burn coming from your aching muscles and bleeding palms from holding on so tightly. It will be apparent for years to come where you were pained by the nail marks your scars will show.

    It’s covering your eyes because you’ve seen too much; you know too much. The images are even more vivid in your mind than they were before you, but you fear what you’ll see next when you open them.

    It’s the smooth, carved in places on your face from the rivers of tears that engraved their signature in your face, stinging like acid and reminding you.

    It’s having to pound your fists in protest, wishing, longing for those moments to be possible again.

    You can’t just forget how perfect it was. You won’t. You don’t want to.

    It’s knowing you’re slowly poisoning yourself.

    It’s knowing you’re too scared to stop.

    It’s knowing you’ll still hope, even though there is nothing left to save.

    It’s ignoring the truth when you know it’s the end.

    It’s the death of knowing you’d do anything to make it feel right,

    Even just for a day.