Catharsis

She rushed into the bathroom, her hands shaking violently as she locked the door. She sank into the floor and the tears started coming, dripping into her lap, leaving tiny, wet pools that quickly gave way to little, black spots on her jeans. They looked like miniature black holes... so dark, so empty... She stared at their gloomy emptiness as she thought about them.

All of them, one by one, how they had treated her.

drip,drip,drip,drip,drip,drip

She shut her eyes tight and tried to think of one person whom she could lean on. She grabbed the bottom of her plush bathrobe and pulled it off the hook it was hanging on behind the door. She held it close to her body and buried her face into it's warm softness.

No one...

She had never looked to her parents for support, she had always felt like more of an adult than either of them, forever trying to resolve their petty, never ending arguments; always stuck in the middle.
She didn't want to bother either of her sisters about it, Amani was never comfortable dealing with other people's problems and Maya was too young.
Musa, her brother, had grown distant from her a long time ago.
She had always been the Problem Solver, the Blame Taker, and she was getting tired of it, so tired...

And then there was HIM...
The person she had always leaned on, even if it was just in her thoughts, was the reason she was sitting here on the bathroom floor, looking to a bathrobe for comfort.

No, I will not do this...

"Suck it up, it's not the end of the world", she told herself. "You are so pathetic sometimes, stop being such a martyr..."

She re-arranged the bathroom mats, scrubbed off a spot on the bathroom mirror with her sleeve and took one last look at herself before she unlocked the door.

Her eyes were an angry, swollen red. She reached for the faucet but quickly turned it back off.

The water was too cold and no one was going to notice anyway...

Life's Unfortunate Irony

The more you get used to 

being strong for everybody else,

The weaker it will make you...

Lesson Learnt!

Poetic as it may sound,

DO NOT wear rose-scented, crimson lipstick to the park...

unless you WANT the bees to mistake your mouth for a flower!

Memory Lane is A Lonely Place

It was just another lazy Monday afternoon, the sun was streaming through the white chiffon curtains so that it felt almost soft and creamy against her face. It put her in a good mood, ready to tackle the day's chores. She put aside the book she was reading and went to the closet to get bedsheets.

Usually she despised changing the sheets but she was unusually happy this afternoon.

She pulled out the cream colored, satin sheet set. She ran her fingers on the fabric. Silky, smooth and creamy, just like the sunlight had felt on her face.

She threw off the old sheets, and spread the fresh ones on the bed. The crisp and clean scent of freshly done laundry wafted through the air.

It made her smile...

But something didn't seem right.


She couldn't quite put her finger on it, but there was something.


At the back of her mind, trying to crawl back into her thoughts.


She tried to ignore it, but she couldn't.


"It's been a year...", she said to herself aloud.


She took a step back from the bed, like it was a time machine and it would suck her into itself. Walking away wouldn't help. It had already taken her back.

Back into his arms....


She had stopped thinking about him as much now. She hadn't forgotten him, she just chose not to think about him so often. She had stopped reading the hundreds of text messages over and over. Reading them now made her feel like he had been taunting her love for him, telling a needy woman what she wanted to hear and not even that, he had never been the expressive, romantic type. She had stopped going to his blog. Stopped refreshing the memories. Stopped hoping.

And it had worked.


She had convinced herself that she was never as important to him as she had thought she might be in the past, that it just wasn't possible. That he would never think about her and she shouldn't think about him either. That he must have forgotten about her a long time ago. That he was happy in his life and she wasn't even important enough to be a memory.

"Why did it all seem so real then?", she thought to herself many times, how could she have been so naive?

You'd think it would make her sad, but she was stronger than that, it actually made not having him in her life anymore, a lot easier. She had buried the memories, the thoughts, the love, deep in a distant, lonely corner of her heart, one that even she didn't have access to.

But it had all come flooding back that lazy Monday afternoon.