Message in a Bottle 16
I hate putting disclaimers before something that means a lot to me, but this is important.
The following— lets call it —word exploration, is in no way a pity grab or a jab at any of you lovely people who continually show me support and kindness. I don’t want to have to explain it, because that insinuates there’s something wrong with it. But I really don’t want anyone to take it the wrong way. I wrote this for personal healing, and I share it in case anyone needs to read it, anyone who might relate. It’s me navigating through aspects of social media and the perception of the world that I realize have been harming me.
It’s my party. I’ll cry if I want to.
There is often an emptiness after highs. After goals end and adrenalin ebbs.
It’s this pouring my heart into something only for it to have the faintest flicker of a beep on the world’s heart monitor the day I set it free. To get a “Nice!” or “Congrats” before it’s forgotten entirely.
Or nothing at all …
Ironically it’s hearts that are what’s given. And they’re never enough. Dirty, rotting things, they’re a fabrication that corrodes what’s real. Never enough. That magic number you have in your head? It’s a lie. Just like the intangible world we live with one foot tangled up in.
I bleed color, life, and tears, regrets, and secret fears into this culmination of somethings.
I call it art.
I give it to others because it was never made for just me. But I can’t make others want it, let alone see it.
I sit at the party on abandoned fairgrounds— no, it’s a basement.
Unfinished, cracked floors …
We couldn’t afford a rug.
There’s not much light. The boundaries of the room, wherever they may be, are lost in shadow. A few friends are there, lighting the space softly with their own little lights, but their expressions are vague. They are only ghosts of people I think I know.
In the end. Even they go. One by one, each one taking their light with them.
Until.
Once again.
It’s just me and this thing I created, lying bare on the table. It still has bits of my hair and skin stuck between its cracks, my blood staining it in splatters.
Is it ugly?
Should I have cleaned it up better before sharing?
Does it matter?
I turn to the door, taking the last light with me, off to bleed into something new. It’s all I know to do. But I leave that last something where it is. Because what I’m learning, or striving to learn, is that the gory, beautiful, imperfect, perfection on the table isn’t me and whatever happens to it doesn’t have to affect me.
It doesn’t have to.
--Ellie
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