The words “I’m thinking of moving on” have rung around my thoughts like a broken melody often repeating with different lyrics to the same tune. It’s a vicious cycle of waking up in the middle of the night, having a bad dream, seeing his face or his voice pulling long-forgotten anxiety out from the pit of my stomach.
I’m thinking of moving on but it is hard when I refuse to acknowledge what I went through for two years in high school. I keep living in this false reality believing that repressing my memories is the most effective form of coping even after it’s failed me time and time again. The memories always resurface, through a smell, a look, a saying, a song. Elliott Smith.
That’s always what we had. Our relationship began its first dance to the tune of “Waltz #2” and where we one, two, threed through countless nights of terror, screaming, uncomfortableness, riddled with false senses of love and familial issues to keep us bonded. I was 14, and you were 20.
I thought I was hot s***, pretending to act as if I could vote, could smoke, could drink. So much time has seemed to pass but yet I still can recall as if those memories were to have happened this morning.
I’m thinking of moving on because I am tired of being haunted, feeling like I am being watched by his eyes that I’ve kept in the back of my mind. Those nights with notes of I love you crescendoing through memories faded. There is a mentality that people must get over their trauma to fully move on, but yet I keep grasping at different methods that fall short of my grasp.
There is but one thing that is left that I refused to do since: write about it. I’ve always sewed in parts of memories into fictional stories telling myself that this isn’t me that went through this. This isn’t me who sat in my childhood room telling him that I want to break up. That wasn’t me who watched him punch my wall from anger.
When I pull my main character with other fictional names and take off the mask, I find the meaning behind the facade. The same feeling eating away at me that I cannot face my trauma because I am afraid to open up. Sometimes that is the only way.
I’m thinking of moving on because it’s time. I’ve found the time to grow and help change myself from what I was then. I focused on my studies and found my niche with reading books and writing. I’ve untrapped myself from the dream world where I slipped into believing we’d move to California and swore on it through spit. Broken promise.
I’ve reconnected with the people that knew me well during these years or at least knew a part of me hiding behind a happy face. These same friends have also grown to appreciate the value of people and their stories. No one is a blank book.
I’m thinking of moving on because I am ready to. I am ready to face myself and help to guide the lost soul through the labyrinth crumbling to the ground.
I am moving on.