I feel empty. Shell shocked.
I am making myself move my fingers to type these words
Forcing them to go through the motions
Hoping motion will create meaning.
I thought this would be worse
The moment when I realized that I would have to let you go.
I thought I would cry large elephant tears that would slide slowly down my face until they turned into a torrent.
I thought they would fall faster and faster until everything beyond the iron wall of emotion was scarred and blurred into submission. Then I would no longer see the things around me that gave life meaning and I could weep until I felt worn out, beaten to sleep by tears.
Instead I sit here.
Staring at the wall.
I did not need to be blinded from significance.
It simply lost its meaning.
I feel as if a giant hand reached inside my body and hollowed me out and I contemplate stepping in to my stomach, right foot first, and pulling myself in inch by inch. Press me flat and roll me in to a ball so I can be stood by the door like a sleeping bag. I will collect dust there.
This emotional genocide was not an individual dying off of each part. I did not have time to say goodbye to each mechanism as it withered.
It was an atom bomb. A sudden explosion that decimated what feelings I had left and created an utter waste land. There is nothing left to see, so I no longer do.
I wonder what a breeze feels like in the barest sense of the word. I wonder in the pitted shadow of discussion. It is a question posed for the world in words only, swept away if it ever did come up.
I silently wish for the torrent that would grant rest and refresh.
(c) Lauren Otheim – 2010
laurenmichelleotheim
Poetry of the Soul 