i used to be one of those people that didn't really understand triggers and how the simplest of things could send you tumbling down a rabbit hole back into that memory. i never understood how something like a word or making breakfast or the way somebody says a sentence could cause your stomach to heave and your mouth to go dry and your fists to clench so tightly that you think your palms are bleeding. i never understood any of that. i never got how somebody's mind could be wired to such give such tiny, irrelevant things such big meanings, how a syllable could become the equivalent to a landmine, how a gesture could become the same thing as a trip wire.

and then you happened. and i got it. i got it too well. i understood because then suddenly, somebody reaching over to rub my back would make me go still. too still. and for a few seconds, i wouldn't be able to move because it wasn't my friend, it was you. suddenly, somebody is singing a song you used to sing and i have to leave the room because i can feel my heart trying to claw its way out of my throat. it took me over a year to let somebody call me 'angel' again because that was what you called me and every time i thought i was ready to be over all the stupid minuscule bullshit parts of us i just wasn't. i'm still just not. you commented on one of my photos a few months back and it ruined my entire day. i could not let it go. i can't let it go.

and maybe this isn't what having a trigger is like, but it sure feels like there are landmines peppered everywhere i go and tripwires all around me for other people to get tangled up in so they can watch me run, or cry, or do absolutely nothing at all.

maybe this is the remnants of the heartbreak i never realized was happening until it was too late to fix it. maybe it's just that, and maybe i'm not as fucked up as i think i am.

but it feels like i stepped off of one battlefield just to get caught up in another. it feels like you're not gone no matter how much i wish you were, but i can't bring myself to block you because that would mean you're definitely gone, and i don't think i want that, yet. or at all.

is this what abuse does to people? this back and forth, this tiptoeing around? is this what an aftermath is like? because i want to go back to not knowing how this feels. i want to go back to not getting it and not understanding how small things could rip you to shreds within seconds. i'm so tired of being scared to walk around. i just want the mines and wires to disappear. i just want to stop being afraid of being detonated.

-c.h.

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