Rips And Tears

Life,

So easily ripped away.

Torn,

Grasped firmly and pulled away without resistance.

All the while,

I’m kicking and screaming,

Biting,

Fighting,

Struggling to hold on to what is rightly mine.

What is rightly theirs.

A life,

Their life,

Shared with mine.

Screaming my head off in a padded room,

Cause I know how easily it can be taken,

Stolen.

Such an effort,

To hold on,

My nails tearing from their beds,

Fingertips rubbed raw,

Joints pulled to near breaking,

As I hang on by mere threads,

Grasping at the garb of my loved one.

Then it breaks,

Those eternal threads tear,

The only tether now gone.

And for what?

Exhaustion.

Trauma piles up day by day,

Moment by moment,

And try as you might, to plow away the piles of pain,

Eventually it topples,

A crushing weight on one’s shoulders.

All too aware, of the constant ripping and tearing.

Tears welling, taking over,

Panic setting in,

Despair making its home,

An awful heart-wrenching loss,

Constant and throbbing,

Adding to the teetering towers of trauma that threaten to spiral into an avalanche.

When will it be too much?

When will I give up?

I’m so young, and there’s so much further for me to travel in life,

Yet I have so much baggage.

So much to lug around and drag me down.

What will it be like in a month from now,

A year from now?

Will I be overwhelmed by then?

When will the line be crossed,

When I can no longer function?

When will the line be crossed,

When I no longer want to function.

I promise I will always be fighting, fighting for life-

For mine, for others’,

But the weight will someday become crushing,

And my grasp on life will slip.

There’s only so much strength my small body, my small being can muster.

The rips and tears bring tears,

Welling up from my eyes, burning and heavy.

The sobs that follow,

The heart-wrenching, breath crushing heaves,

Cries of agony at my misfortune in this life.

This horrible, twisted creation called life.

I’m forced to go on, for my sake and theirs,

Wipe away the saltwater on my face and move on,

Stitch up the rips, mend the tears,

When all I want to do is fall apart like a forgotten stuffed toy.

Sure, there is fun,

There is happiness,

But that’s just a veneer,

A fake front to life,

Covering away the bodies and incomplete families in the background.

Nothing can ever be truly whole.

What is this life,

So cruel as to force people to go on without the things that complete them.

It gives joy only to take it back and never again give back that same feeling of bliss.

A china teapot shattered,

Pieced back together,

Only for the shards to be chipped away again, one by one.

I want to scream,

To rip myself apart in the face of life,

To deny it the pleasure of doing that itself.

To cry out,

“You’ve lost this now, you who never has to deal with the pain of denial such as this.”

You have no idea how much it hurts,

Seeping out from within its deep prison,

Tainting the layers that make up my psyche,

Ripping away my humanity bit by bit-

Or is humanity only to be in pain?

It gives me my humanity, forcing it upon me.

I don’t want humanity if all it means is to be in pain.

It means we care,

But if caring only causes pain,

Then what is it worth?