The only thing that sticks out to me at a time like this is the feelings that sink in, soaking through my protective layers and getting at me where I’m most vulnerable.
It’s not the initial sensation that lingers, or even the immediate emotional reaction usually satisfying some kind of superficial need; it’s the lingering effect, that thing that sets in after the knowledge that something was able to affect you so profoundly even with you guarding yourself against it, taking whatever steps you thought you could take, having been emotionally destroyed and rebuilt so many times you thought you were too broken to even feel anymore, that’s what sets in and turns you into that old thing you used to curse for being weak or broken.
Only it’s not weakness, you know now, because there is neither strength, nor weakness, in feeling this way. The profundity of how purely and utterly your defenses were erased is beautifully poetic, and you realize even as the initial high of the superficial sensation fades that you are marked, you are tainted, that your energy is forever tied to that moment in which that thing you never expected to be anything other than a moment’s release, or hold, or observation, suddenly became something that reaches across time, reaches forward from that moment to catch you and hold you in its embrace, lovingly or lustfully or needing, and that’s when that seed of hope takes hold, the long-buried gem of things you thought gone forever, locking fingers with the something and completing that mysterious process you spend your life making a clumsy mockery of, and suddenly the roots are laid and you are aware of yourself and everything you are that does not deserve what you are feeling.
Time’s up.
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