bruixeria:

The true cost of drowning only becomes apparent when you return to life. The refracted world you viewed from beneath the ocean shatters over your face as you emerge. You think you’re going to wash up on that same shore you walked into the water from. You think everything remained in place, waiting for your return to spring forward into motion.

Maybe those you loved stood at your corpse with shuttered eyes. Maybe their mouths twisted. Maybe they too felt this unimaginable grief and the helpless sour of yearning. But what did you know of their pain? What did you care what it cost for them to walk away? You were dead, then, and beyond the concerns of the living.

You claw at the sand. You want to be the same girl. But they are walking far beyond you now.

I wrote this post last May, when I intended for this tumblr just to be a dumping ground for me to vent all my fucked up feelings, and then I put this post (and a bunch of others from the same time) on private when it grew into a public blog. But lately my mind keeps returning to those entries, and this one specifically.

The words I wrote here still resonate with me. The pain of those I left and those who left me is not something I believe will ever pass away. Certain wounds are inscribed on the heart and time does nothing to heal them beyond providing a flimsy suture. To look back on years and years of your life and see nothing, only a grey haze of pain where memories should be and empty spaces in the place of people you loved, isn’t easy.

But I no longer regret the paths that lead me here, to this moment, to the person I am now. If crawling back from the sea meant acknowledging that there are people and opportunities I lost forever, it also means the return of emotions and relationships which I thought gone for good. It means the ability to stumble my way forward, across the sands, into the patterns of life that when given time, become not a forced motion but a fact easy as breathing, and more true, and more precious for all that you know what else could be.

I guess I wanted to give this piece a coda, for the sake of the girl who wrote it as she shivered in the dark and with unimaginable strength, pulled herself back from the precipice. As if I could shout across time and distance to give her hope and warmth. As if she might hear me, even for a moment.