Here's a snippet of a secret project I'm writing that I shared on my Facebook pages, but I thought I'd make it more permanent and share it on here. It's dark, emotional, and full of heartache, but it's something I've been aching to write. Slowly but surely, it'll get done. Enjoy!
There was a time I wrote every thought, emotion, and desire into my diary. It was a thick book full from the years of abuse and heavy with ink.
Not anymore.
It was all part of that section of my dismal life filed under "Used to do". I "used to" pour my soul out on those pages as if my existence depended on each curvature of letters woven together and purged onto each page. It fueled me, healed me, and worst of all, kept my sanity for my eyes alone.
That was until, of course, the one person I loved tainted it in the worst possible way. He hadn't love me enough to leave it be when he found it one day, nor could he hold himself back from reading my words. He stole that from me. And when he spat my own phrases back to me, his acid words reading off the pages of my innermost soul, it was detrimental. It warped something inside me that day. He asked things I couldn't or wouldn't answer. Things about ex-lovers, desires, crimes of my soul, and secrets never meant for the light of day. Secrets about him. Secrets I didn't even want to know or care to recall anymore. Yet his bitterness was apparent and his need to know was greater than anything he held in his blackened heart for me.
There are things we should only tell ourselves; hidden things meant for no one else but our own hearts, and he'd taken them from me.
When he handed back the book, it was no longer mine anymore. Its purpose had shattered. The soft leather bands on the corners and silky expanse of tapestry gracing the cover with a picturesque landscape of a Japanese countryside filled with cherry blossoms, bamboo stalks, and made-up geishas delicately holding tiny umbrellas in their hands no longer filled me with an old, familiar comfort.
He'd fractured that part when he had read my words off those pages in his bitter tongue and words dripping with a resentment I had denied for some time. Even when it was over and he walked away leaving me in silence, I knew things had changed. I held the small book tight to my chest before flipping through my pages riddled with inky blots and gestures, full of years of thoughts I'd written, doodled, and mused about. Nothing would ever be the same. They couldn't be now. He'd made sure of it.
It was then that I committed the worst travesty against my own self. Something I never thought I'd ever fathom or believe I could be capable of doing. After moments of numbing stillness, I reacted. I followed through by tearing each delicate page from the bindings, shredding them one by one with my fingers before burning the entire diary soaked with details of my life up until then in an all-consuming act of arson. As I watched it burn, the flames weren't cathartic nor did it leave me feeling any better or whole. Each page curled up into ashes, representing the person I'd been up until that day. It was a person I'd never see, read about, or hear from again.
When the flames died away and there was nothing but soot left to sift through, I went on, never speaking about the diary again. It was no more, and I never kept another. Never wrote about my days, my thoughts, my love, my hate, my detrimental idiocracies or my achievements ever again. I'd been the girl on those burnt pages. A living, breathing and fully alive entity echoing her essence across each brittle page.
That girl was gone forever, and I swore I'd never be fragile again.
"Untitled Project"
Copyright 2016 Alexia Purdy
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