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When you've drown as many times as I have, you start to believe you can breathe underwater, that there's a quality of invincibility in you that makes you fit, resilient -- you think nothing can put you down, nothing can stop you, as if you've been born to swim through chaos, survive a fucking hurricane just by standing in the eye of it and when all of it is over you move on.  It turns out it doesn't work that way. I've always thought that time had the ability to wash away scars... blur them faint into almost non-existent lines very easy to ignore, and then I'd think of them as stilled water under a well cemented bridge, I'd learn to look at them aloofly, from a distance -- not at all.

                                                                                   But at some point

I'd always catch myself wondering if I'd really worked them through or I am still resenting, if I am truly the one who's wearing them or they are wearing me instead. 

                                                     Wondering ...

how much of my energy I've wasted trying not to let them become who I am..

                                 or...

how many defects of character I can recognize have been shaped by them.

And then I'd come to the shocking realization that every ounce of this charcoal soul,

how it moves, speaks and breathes; it's all because and despite of them,

bust mostly because and rarely despite.

I was twenty two when everything started catching up on me.

I don't know how it happened or why it kept coming back to me as often; I don't know why the more I tried to fix it the more I broke. I don't know why I couldn't just ignore it how I've trained myself to do. I just know that as I went on unravelling, instead of getting better, I became bit by ugly bit a bit more jaded. I noticed that I never really did overcome anything I thought I left behind, that I've only stuffed it down into a tiny, very tiny box to shut it all out. I guess that's not exactly what you'd call dealing with things but rather burying them.

That day I sat on the bathroom floor with the lights off, between the toilet and the bathtub, as if I was that nameless kid again, trying to avoid the world outside the door, pretending noise is not happening, reality is not suffocating... and life hasn't become an act of constant survival in the middle of this loveless holocaust we were; though right then it was just me, a pack of smokes and all those things I've never said in the only room that knew my darkest fears, and I spent a lot of time staring through the skylight, smoking in silence, thinking...

In that darkness I cried, I wasn't sure why I was crying but I cried. I cried because you died, I cried because my dog died, I cried because my cat died, I cried because everything around me had a tendency to die, because my fridge didn't work and I hated my job, because my wi-fi connection was shit, because I failed a midterm and I felt lonely and scared and irrationally helpless in the very same way a four year old might when mama loses them at Walmart. But I think I mostly cried because it was in that very instant that I realized something within me changed and I was mourning myself. When I dried my tears I felt different. Indifferent. Dangerous. As if I could just sift through the seams of the universe and never come back [...]