Sentence

Those words awoke something raw in me. I cried for a week straight, until the tears ran dry. I considered it, seriously too, but I wondered if my dying would only create more pain in its wake. That was the last thing I wanted. Maybe. So, instead, I stared at this place in my heart. Like a wound gaping open, waiting for someone to nurse it back to health. Nothing came for me, except emptiness. Nothing came for me except what I deserved. 

Am I the abuser or the abused in this tale? Neither cancels out the other. I take great pleasure in picturing myself dying viscerally in a freak accident, drowning in the Aakulam Kaayal, or slitting a vein and letting myself bleed out. But it's all pointless. Like I said, death leaves its only, beloved, child behind when it appears and leaves. Grief. And then it is upto the others to mother it, nurse it, and tend to it. Rage at it, cry out to it, beseech it, try and bribe it to leave. But it never does. Grief is a loyal companion. I would know. 

I don't know how I can make amends. All the bridges I burnt to ashes, all the tender moments I watched go up in smoke, all the anger I created instead, all of it, all of it flashes behind my eyelids. I open my eyes and I'm in the midst of it all. I am no victim this time. This time I'm the perpetrator. And I am the crime itself.

And I must live with it.