This is reminiscent of some of my other blog posts on an ancient blog from high school. I know it’s melodramatic but I hit a real rough moment and needed to process it. Writing has always been my method of processing emotional moments or just general feelings so I feel back on using it for this.
It was also a good experiment for writing a Real-World piece and I wanted to store the feelings for one of my characters later. Also, I honestly think there is a useful message here. (Though holy fuck, letting myself share this on social media is also hard.)
This is not the unspoken “I love you” that bubbles to the top in a rush of confused fondness and gets left unsaid for one reason or another. That “I love you” turns into vague or wistful regrets for moments of affection lost and little else.
The “I love you” that has to be swallowed is a poison to the soul. The words choked down because to voice them would be to break a taboo, cross a line, break a peace or just be unfair to someone whose opinion matters. They quiver on the lips, burn in the throat and settle angrily against the heart. You mask the pain the swallowed words bring, hide the wounds festering on your soul until it becomes a reflex. But no wound can be ignored forever and the poison affects you in subtle way at first.
Simple joys become small daggers driven into your heart. Their laugh, their smile or a thousand other things drag grind broken glass into a soul screaming for solace. You find yourself always watching for the familiar gesture, turn or movement that would ordinary conversation into a moment of precious intimacy while knowing you can never answer nor offer it. The agony sweet, as long you’re with them the pain seems to retreat. So you become addicted to the moments that bring the toxic “I love you”s to the surface, relying on the reflex to mask the pain and keep you moving forward.
The swallowed words, made ever more toxic by your addiction to the moments they frame, fester untended. The poison corrodes your core, the you that you’re supposed to be and burn at the foundation of the relationship. The pain becomes a constant background companion but people aren’t meant to endure pain forever. You begin to try and ‘defend’ yourself, lashing out or twisting your own sharp daggers into the other person just in the off chance that hurting them will stop your own pain. You become embittered at the world, the poison spreading beyond the relationship itself. The poison turns your ideals and dreams into mocking, hopeless reminders of a future that could’ve been. The reflex to swallow the words and the pain becomes holistic and you swallow any pain to hold in those same wells of poison. You learn to tuck it away, vanish it and every time you swallow another set of “I love you”s, it becomes harder to break free.
But the poison is not invincible. The light of self-knowledge is anathema to it. Acknowledging the damage it is doing is the first steps to burning the infections out and repairing the damage to the soul. Be wary of the swallowed “I love you” but be even more careful of what you let it turn you into. Examine the soul, examine the heart and examine your actions carefully. You don’t want to turn into someone cruel and embittered just because you couldn’t be honest with yourself.