It's happening again.

These days I'm finding it harder and harder to discern between truth and lies, reality and unreality. They blur together in shades of black and blue so close I can't tease them apart. My thoughts were a tangled web of riddles that I try and don't know how to read.

I vacillate between one path and the other. One promises safety, perhaps, but loss. The other is unknown, and loss can still lie at its end. Whither they led I do not know, and with feet on either side I only hurt—myself and others.

My mind cast to another time, a similar feeling, a similar dilemma.

I read words I myself had once written, and find they are the same as the ones I pen today.

And I remembered. and I forgot. I remembered what happened but I did not remember, and what I did remember...

Why can I not remember?

Was it because I did it to myself? silenced my own voice and chose to forget? I had deserved this and all that came after. Didn't I?

I'm now convinced there was no "almost-worth-it" when it came to human bonds. They either were or they were not. And you never knew, did you? What lay on someone's heart, whether they would betray you or uphold you. You can't know. Not until the bond is tested, and by then, it's too late.

Because then, too, it had been a face of innocence, and afterward, a voice that said, "I am sorry, but you yourself did this to me, to you."

But I digress. I was speaking of now.

To step unto the edge and watch as another chasm opened before me.

No hearth, no home, no safety.

Only emptiness, and a widening gulf, and the lost.

No, I can't do this. not again.

We can only drift away, let it fade to nothing, only traces of memory of some shared time, that it might be said, as I said of all the others:

"How small a part of time they shared, that are so wondrous, sweet, and fair."

And I know, nothing I say or write makes sense right now.

You tell me I'm forgetting many things lately, which might be true. My mind drifts and I can't seem to focus anymore. It's just like last time, just like the time before that, and the time before that.

They tell me to remember—these people at the facility, so what lay hidden might be brought back to the surface, laid to rest. It's always this way, but it comes up again and again and again.

So I comb through the memories, read them again and again. And again. Then again. And as I do, I think there comes the return of some fleeting images.

But in these days, I can't tell if I'm living in memories of the past while the present melts away from me, or if my mind has painted new memories for me on the canvas of nightmares.

And I can't decide which would be more terrifying. Because I don't know how to explain why I'm drowning in a deluge of emotion that I had thought long buried. That they're a mass crashing over me, and all I can think of was bridges and trains and water and nails clawing through my skull, and the screeching in my head and too much water and drowning.

My fists beat against the walls of my mind. Because I know I should be happy. What is wrong with me? I should be happy. I should be happy. What is wrong with me?

I should be happy.

I don’t know how.

And I don’t know how to say I’m sorry. It’s not enough—will never be enough.

And in the end, I still cn't not tease apart the riddles, tell the truth from lies, and I wonder why it matters. Because it all leads to the same conclusion anyway.

"Live," she said to me, but I did not know how to tell her all I could see was nothing, and nothing, and nothing.

"Just for today," she says.

When it came down to it, I still couldn't voice my deepest, most vulnerable thoughts. They rose up and got caught in my throat, but I swallowed them back again and again and again. Put on the familiar facade.

I'm not okay. I'm not okay. I'm not okay.

Why can't I just fucking say it? Why does it always have to get this bad and I still can't fucking say it?

"You made my heart a black hole. You are a black hole."

Those had been some of his last words to me, etched into my mind. I had sworn never to be that person again. Even after a decade, I can't bring myself to let someone into my darkness until I'm already way too far gone and it's too late. God, the shame, the shame, the shame, the fucking shame. Every time I tried, those words resurfaced and cut through the moment of weakness and I shove it away again.

I am so afraid. And I am so fucking tired.