I spy with my little eye, a woman whose eyes are so glossed over with delusion that she is blind to the idea that her mistakes are buried so deep in our souls that she will go an eternity sans forgiveness.

Her vision is too blurry to see that she has soaked bridges, held together with strings of hearts that don’t belong to her, in gas and struck them all with a match lit from the fire in her eyes. So foggy that she doesn’t even know those very bridges are burning to the ground, falling to piles of ash and lost hope.

She sees only where she thinks she is and can’t remember exactly where she’s come from.

She has dug herself up from the unrecognizable level of the hell she created for herself. A level so dangerous it mimics the real world she was never able to completely grasp. She believes she has altered herself into a being she could never be, one who understands what she has done to dismember the bodies left behind, as a way to keep herself moving.

She believes she has transformed into someone who realizes the all-encompassing drought she has created in the tear ducts of those she slaughtered with her tongue and her eyes. They have cried too many tears fighting for her while she spoke ill and looked away.

She truly believes she is a person who not only understands, but repents at our feet because she feels, in her gut, the pain she drug from our brains to our feet crippling us physically as we crippled ourselves mentally, fighting to get back up. She believes if she continues fighting, she will come out a victor, but doesn’t know we are all so far gone that we drown out her apologies with memories of the past.

Those memories of the times she walked on us with heavy feet and crushed us like leaves on a busy city sidewalk; the times she cut open our hearts and forgot to notice that we were bleeding out in front of her. Her murderous mouth stabbed open wounds with every word she shouted. That was the worst part—the multitude of pain that struck us from behind, for she knew right where to hit.

Yet she has still found her conscience, a place inside her that believes she can walk with ease back into our lives with an illuminated screen reading “I’m sorry.” She is too hazy to remember that this is reality and she has cut us all so deep that even with every stitch and bandage use to heal ourselves, there will always be a scar.

A scar winding from our hearts that have bled out, to our brains that have pounded at the walls of skulls wondering why, to our eyes that have been drained of enough tears to fill the dark parts of us, to our hands that have shook with fear and anger—holding weapons directed in the wrong direction as we struggled not to hurt ourselves—all the way to our feet that had to walk away.

So I made the courageous decision to walk away from her. 

They call it a “leap of faith,” the moment you make a move that has so much opportunity for damage. What they don’t tell you is that when you are making those moves with your own well-being in the back of your mind, you will land on your feet nine times out of 10. They don’t tell you that a leap of faith isn’t quite the same as jumping off the edge and trusting someone to catch you, because you are the one catching yourself.

They forget to mention that it’s okay to be scared while looking over the edge, but if it’s yourself that you are jumping for, then jump.

Always jump.

Pick up your feet, one step at a time, and choose to walk away.

 

Author: Sydney M. Colby

Editor: Nicole Cameron

Image: Geralt/Pixabay