Where The Strength Goes

Tell yourself you’re strong enough times, tell yourself that you’re undefeatable, hard, unbreakable, without weakness, and the words ‘ill start becoming a superpower you never thought could exist. Too bad there’s a part of you that will never buy into the illusion, will never let itself be buried, covered up, and restrained. Too bad it’s the most prominent part about you. It’s all layers of water on top of itself, dark pools open and exposed for the world to see. No matter how many times you autopsy your brain, cut it and snip it and rewire it, that part of you still remains. Sometimes you’ll be able to put a temporary shroud around them, veil them with joy or gaiety. But by the end of the day you’re left panting at your bedside, exhausted with the effort to keep rebuilding those thin barriers when they so easily collapse back into your eyes. You spend so much of your time erecting them when they fall. Parts of you that you refuse to acknowledge wonders if it’s worth it. No matter what you do, those eyes refuse to shut.

Hard or soft, it doesn’t matter. The layers remain unguarded, open, reflecting the things you need most hidden. They are broken entrances with the door hanging crooked on rusty hinges, full of color that peels as paint, they’re all made up and echoing with don’t look and don’t ask and help and please and don’t touch me and please and look away and hold me and if you keep a hard mind maybe all of it will wither into shavings of heated metal that you never have to claim again. But no matter what you say and what you do and how strong you are, they aren’t discardable things. They are cold contradictions ripping you apart, making you strong and weak and strong and weak, paralyzed with the possibility that it will all be noticed. You are the tide being pulled from the land, back and forth by the moon and the sun and the fears you can’t won’t express.

So to make up for it, you strengthen your body your will your mind. You string out every tendon, flatiron every muscle, dip every bone into strong strong strong until there is no bend and no break and titanium pales in comparison. Your legs are hard and fast and unwavering as your toes grip the world so that you can launch yourself from it. Your hands are just, sure things with five points of reliability as they pull you up and up and up as they helps right your feet when this place you call home turns on its head. They never hesitate to comfort or carry or work, calloused things that they are. But you have banished any data, any code that would allow them to hang by your sides as someone comforts you. That’s been eroded away, or so you think, really it sits like a bright neon light in the orbs that refuse to stop calling out all of your faults.

You’ve done everything you can think of. You’ve bloodied your hands on the keys to ease the pressure of the layers, you boxed all the whispers in your head, drowned them in those waters so that they wouldn’t rattle and shake your concentration, yet you still haven’t been able to quiet the stories oozing from your eyes. You don’t understand why. You are brave and strong and self-sufficient, independent in all the ways that allows you to stand firmly.

The only relief you participate in is that there are too few who really know the language of eyes. And even fewer who take the time to care that there is one. They’re too busy blindsided by their own revolutions to care that your armor is chinked irrevocably, stained deep so that you can’t wash it clean. But fear of the minority that pays attention keeps you bouncing on your toes over the waves. Your mind is sound, bent a little too far to the right, heart caged without any of the lusts of contact required by humanity – yet still you feel threatened.

Maybe being strong isn’t the same thing as being brave.

Are you a strong coward then? Or a brave weakness?

You haven’t found an answer. You’re not sure that you ever will.