Right

“I need something to be good. I need something to feel right. OK? I’m not depressed. My heart is not broken. I’m not grieving. He is not dead. But there is this other feeling that doesn’t completely feel fair. Or right. Or good. And every morning I wake up and there’s this pit, this feeling here that maybe my dreams are over. Maybe, maybe I had my dreams, and they’re over now. And I’m going to be this girl. No kids, no family. He was my family. And now he’s someplace else, and I let him go. And it’s good that I did. I mean, it’s better for him. But for me…  So I need something to be good. I need a reason to get up every morning, to not crawl back in that cave that I was in before I met him. You know he saved me. You were there. You remember how I was. I was dark. That war made me dark. And that darkness, it is still in me. He just lit it up. So I just thought, I just thought, maybe to beat back that darkness, I would be something good. I would do something good.”

-Modified G/A

I used to swim a lot before you, not because I liked it either.  I used to swim and stay at the bottom until I needed air.  I used to jump in the water, swim fast and swim for as long as I could. I would swim until I felt that all of the air had escaped my body.

The first time you came back and we slept together, I woke up in a panic. My heart was racing.  You hate sleeping with the lights on.  That night, everything changed.  You always made sure there was light.

I used to lock the doors.  I used to wake up any time I heard a noise.  I became especially particular about distinguishing footsteps and the refrigerator making the noise it always did.  The worst part was listening to my heart beat, it got faster the more I tried to focus on the noise.  Sometimes I thought it was the loudest thing in the room.  You could hear the fear.  Every single night.  Nonetheless, I learned to live in fear until I no longer could.  Until the day you came back. 

I seem to forget about the warm things I felt.  It’s almost as if I became immune to the feeling of you.  I do remember one night.  The dancing in the living room.  The turning on of the light. How the room smelled.  You felt like breathing.

Now, I play it safe.  I settle.  There was all this light you brought, but my darkness overcame it and you left.  It’s like I had everything I could have wanted, and then I had to let it go. I used to dream of things and then make those things a reality.  Now I struggle to remember the purpose of the things that I do.  I used to be bright.  I am back in the water.  Will I ever get to breathe again?

My love is like a blanket
That gets a little bit too warm sometimes
I wanna wrap somebody in it
Who can hold me in his arms
Cause when it got a little too hot in there
He was always stepping out for air and he froze
Oh he froze

-Grace Potter & the Nocturnals