A little bit of nothing

Time sort of feels like it’s frozen, you know? Not really time, but sort of everything else. I can remember the ways that I used to feel all the time, but all those feelings are frozen too. Like I don’t feel much of anything except for all the bad things people are always telling me to get over. I should get over them— I’m 22 now, an adult, time to act like one.

I keep picturing myself in that same spot. The same teenager who waited up at night hoping she wasn’t the sibling who got picked out of the house to be the relief to all my parents anger. One of us would have bruises tomorrow, I hope it isn’t me. That’s still what I feel like.

Stuck there, even though they haven’t touched me in years. And it’s hard to forget, to move on when they’re still there. Still, for whatever reason, I can’t seem to let them go. They took a lot more from me than I realized then, only realizing it now when I can’t share in the same happiness as my peers because being able to feel things was taken from me.

Kind of like a doctor. They see so much death they stop caring about it. I felt so much pain the only way to survive it was to get rid of feeling altogether. We don’t talk about it now. My family doesn’t. As if it never happened at all— as if finally becoming old enough to defend myself made all those years suddenly forgotten and forgiven.

I don’t care much about those bad things that happened. I just want to feel something again. I hurt people too, not the way they hurt me, because I make people feel things for me that I can never feel back. I don’t mean to, and they don’t really feel those things, only think they do. Even still, I never feel sad when the end comes and I can see they’ve been hurt by my coldness. I wish I did. I wish, more than anything, someone could break my heart in the way I’ve done to theirs, and that I could cry and finally understand how it feels.

I don’t know if that made sense. Maybe not.