The Rat.

Part 1: The Bleed

That rat-tat-tatting in her head. The melancholy won’t leave her alone. No matter what she does to quell its insistence., it comes bubbling up, whispering in her ear. She wasn’t meant to be any single person. She has this mish mash of things living inside her that weren’t meant to coexist. She had no idea what she wanted because she wanted everything. And because she wanted everything, she couldn’t commit to anything. 

The rat-tat-tat. It wouldn’t leave her. Every day she would concoct a beautiful remedy of words and dreams to quench her wandering mind. She would tell it secrets and tricks and jokes and beautiful stories and everyday she would think it had worked and then it would come back to her, laughing at her. Hitting her in the face with its candor.

She opened up the manhole to her soul and shouted down, “What do you want?” And what came reverberating back up shocked her with its beauty and its nearness to the echoes of her dreams. The story that was there was written in so many ways over her heart already, But her mind had been the one playing tricks of her. It hadn’t given her the words to access what she already knew.

He loved her and half of her loved him.

Sometimes, I’m scared.

Sometimes I worry that I seduced you out of the shadowy fear in my heart.

I wonder if that assuredness that you were the one just came from my ego’s panic about being alone, today, tomorrow, forever—and that when you decided to come back to me it was just as surprised as I was.

Part 2: The Realization

Three weeks after I wrote this, I opened up my computer to find these words swimming across my screen, right where I had dropped them out of my heart. I didn’t even remember writing them. I do that a lot—bleed the pain out and then let it be on the page, let it out to live in the digitized world, where its vibrations can be diluted and convoluted, like our radio waves seeping out into space. I had travelled all the way to America and back to see him and we had fallen apart. I had done it in the most horrific, suitable way possible, with way too much tequila in me, just like how we fell together. We were at dinner, and I unleashed a spew of judgments that was neither kind nor fair, but really, indeed, my truth that came from the bitchy, stuck-up side of me, the evil shadow side that has grown in time with the fun, caring, explorer girl that he fell in love with.

I told him what I really think about the town he loves–I told him it was nothing special. He taunted me to say what I really meant. I told him it scared me. And that, was the biggest truth of all. To consider moving to a place like that. To return to what I came from terrifies me. I can’t. Not when life is short and the world is wide.

I actually don’t remember the exact moment that did it. What sentence tumbled out of some side of me that I cannot readily conjure up without the help of a half a bottle of tequila and a glass of nice red wine? I blacked out for the five-second climax, but on the way down I remember sitting there within the buzz of that small town restaurant, which actually, I loved, clutching the reigns of my emotions at their very ends—wanting so badly to snatch them back from in front of me and push them further down my chest. The clutter of all that I had convinced myself of—the story I had built on how perfect he and I were—started to evaporate, leaving behind the nothing but the pounding, flesh eating, screaming reality. That we, were simply too different. That we, for all our attempts, did not actually understand each other.

And my mind screamed, “Get out, get out, get out. Now.”

I wanted to take it back. I groveled in my self-loathing and I didn’t stop crying on his couch for three days and even then he would still hold me but no kissing and I still feel the cold blade of that knife stabbing into my heart letting me know that it was over, all the way over, as in terminally over, as in, no more, everything is different and the only thing separating me from having him however I wanted was the line of time, if only I could go back to Tuesday, but even that is a lie because it was never just what I wanted, only pieces of it that I took and begged for more and he could never understand what it was that I was asking him for, and I could never understand how he didn’t understand or how to tell him so he would understand and so many times I wanted to pull our hearts out of our chests and smash them together to make them align, and because I couldn’t, I panicked and ran for all the right reasons, but in all the wrong ways.

I wore his sweatshirt on the 24 hour plane ride home and clutched it between my arms, with my face buried in your scent and relived the memories.

He blocked me on everything.

Asked me to not speak to him.

I started to drown.

Then I opened my computer and saw what my  the universe slapped me in the face with 333 of my own words that screamed know yourself.

And I was released.

Part 3: The Reflection

I read Part 1 for the first time three weeks after I wrote it, after I had travelled to America and back to see him. We broke up while I was there. I had been the one who instigated it–at dinner, with too much tequila in me. I had been mean, brutal. I quite literally, exploded. I was unhappy and I knew down in my soul that we weren’t right for each other. But because he was so amazing and because I loved him deeply, I did everything I could to keep us together. Like, spending 55 hours on a plane so we could spend less than a week together. I resented him for it.

While my soul banged on my insides and told me to leave, I stayed. I was an active participant in the lie of me being happy. Then, when I was drunk and my Truth could bust its way out of my mouth, bringing with it resentment and pent up shouts of rejection and whatever else my shadow side had conjured up, I finally ended my relationship.

When I was sober again, fear took over and fed me a lie that I taught myself a long time ago: I sabotage relationships. For whatever reason, all these years my brain has preferred the story that I have insecurities, issues with commitment, that I feel I don’t deserve love, blah blah blah, and that because of this, I can’t keep relationships together and I always do something to ruin relationships I’m “happy” in.

So this is what my head started feeding my heart again, and I got depressed af. I started tearing myself apart for all the things I had done “wrong” again. I let this idea shred me.

Then, I opened my computer up and on my screen was this thing I wrote, a few weeks before, that I had completely forgotten about. That’s what I do a lot, write stuff down, bleed it out, give it away so I can be. When I read it, this immense weight fell off my heart. It was a message from me to me, telling me I had done the right thing. What had happened wasn’t sabotage, it was me just not being strong enough to admit that I had outgrown someone. It was just me not trusting myself. It was me holding things in for too long, until they couldn’t stay inside any longer. It was me settling, because I was afraid of being alone. Then finally, my soul got a chance to scream its truth, and it did.

I got it, and all the other times I had played the sabotage story in my mind unraveled too. Finally, the pattern made sense to me because it was finally the Truth. It released me. It showed me, that all this time I had spent telling myself I couldn’t be trusted because I break things, literally all I had to do was trust I was breaking things that needed to be broken.

The most amazing part of this story, for me,  was that the word count of this thing I had written was 333 words, my guiding number.

The universe works in mysterious ways, y’all.