Sometimes I wonder if what I’m doing is the right thing.
Defending something that may have already collapsed a long time ago. Yet here I am, still standing in the middle of ruins and dust, trying to rebuild something out of what remains. It’s not a pretty thing to witness. It’s not noble in the way people romanticize patience and endurance. It’s ugly, exhausting, humiliating work.
But I am trying my best.
The question is, are the pillars of this building still strong enough to stand on their own? Or does it need both of us to rebuild? Because if I have to do this alone, I don’t think I have that much patience left. Or that much time.
People think I did the unforgivable thing for fun. As if I woke up one day and decided to destroy something just to fill my spare time. As if hurting someone was a hobby I casually picked up somewhere between loneliness and survival.
They ask questions like, “Why are you blaming someone who is supposed to be the victim?” or “Isn’t this your fault from the very beginning?” And then there are words that are supposed to calm me down, like, “Be patient. This is only a test.”
But I don’t remember ever signing up to be on trial like this.
Maybe everything does come with trials and errors. But what happens when we fail? Do we simply learn from it, or do we burn down to ashes?
Sometimes I wonder if these people know that I was hurt too.
I am hurt now, yes.
But I was hurt long before this. Hurt from not receiving one of the most basic human needs possible: being loved.
I know this is not about wanting validation for what I’ve done.
But that one mistake has carried me so far down the road that, somewhere along the way, it ruined me too.
Now I’m trying to find my way back into myself. To look beneath this skin and bones, all the way into the mind I had overlooked for far too long. I am trying to understand the people around me by first understanding myself: what I do that might affect them, what I feel, what I think, and what parts of me have been speaking through pain instead of clarity.
And no, this is not a pretty thing to see.
There are messy things scattered everywhere. Things I have buried, avoided, justified, swallowed, or swept into corners just to keep everything looking neat. Just so no one would notice. Just so no one would have to see how much of me was already falling apart.
But then… what can I possibly do, in this state where every head is thinking different things all at once, making possibilities, accusations, or even pity?
I don’t want to live in that world.
For a long time, I have played the villain in so many stories, in other people’s versions of what happened. But do they actually want to hear my side of the story? Or do their stories soothe and comfort them so much that they don’t want to understand mine?
Now I’m done overexplaining things, because I know the end result will always be the same:
I am the bad omen in every story.
But even if in the end no one understands me, I refuse to completely disappear from my own story.
