Bitterness

My shame gnaws at me like a famished thing. I've felt it swallowing me throughout the years: consuming me and eroding me. How to run from a bitterness turned from others and thus unto myself? How to forgive amid the loathing and despair? Weak, I was. Always weak, and much like a famished thing myself. I didn't have the strength  to tell the truth, blinded as I was by fear and confusion.
Ah, I hated them; I hated them for the way they looked at me, when I knew the things that I did at the time. I despised the injustice sealed away -- this filthy little secret-- behind closed doors.
But wasn't I the one who truly faltered? Throat closing up rapidly, tears running rampant down my despairing face; I ran from those eyes with a false confession on my lips. Perhaps the truth wouldn't have been so hard to believe if I had actually told it. I simply hadn't been strong enough. And at night, I cried over my own failure. I was only a child, but I prayed that I could die in my sleep and be reborn. I wanted to be anyone, anything, other than myself. I prayed that the person that I was would die.
I never wanted to feel those eyes that smoldered with rebuke saying, "Tell the truth!"
The truth was always first on my tongue, only to be twisted and vomited back out as the lie.
THE LIE.
Why did I lie to them? Why did I let them conquer me and manipulate me into telling them the lie that they so wanted to hear? How could I betray myself so horribly?
Ah, I may be far, far from perfect now, but I was very close to it then. I only wanted them to love me, to keep me. But I was too weak, and in my weakness I destroyed my chance to be loved, and I am close to being cast away and forgotten by them, with relief on their part.
I am so bitter. How could I have been so weak?

Unknown

First, I thought summer would mark the end of school: of graduating and of moving in with the one person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. And then, I thought it would bring an end to everything I'd held dear; I thought it meant the start of a new life in a different city for him, goodbyes, and thousands of "what if...?". Shortly after that, I believed summer would be something of a reprieve from sorrow and confusion. Now I see that summer was truly a time of anger and of pain, of screaming fights and insults that stick inside the mind for years, of hatred.
I understand now that disappointment should be expected around every corner. Nothing is ever as easy as you want or expect it to be. That's life, isn't it? Ever uncertain, always changing, forever indistinct. I guess the only thing to be said about it is that it's nothing to cry about. After all, what's an adventure without a little bit of rocky sailing?

Purification

I've always believed that with knowledge came pain. In a sense, pain is knowledge. With me, it has always brought a clarity of thought that I've never had in situations where I didn't feel pushed to the very edge of sanity, forced to make a choice between a feverish search for truth, and a loss of everything I hold dear.When backed into a corner, you must evaluate all the options: turn back, forget; stay stagnant, refusing to make a decision; or look forward, seeking truth and desiring growth.
People have always questioned a person's necessity for growth. But truly, what are we without knowledge, without understanding? Does mere "being" dare you to dream -- to achieve? Can bare existence impregnate you with the curiosity required in order to discover all the things we need to know? Science, love, happiness: to achieve any, you must grow, you must learn to adapt, to understand, to sympathize with those around you so that we don't destroy one another.
Let us not forget that Adam and Eve may have been perfect, yes, but they also knew nothing and did not progress. It was a choice that changed the world, as well as them. They brought sin into the world, but sin and pain and death are necessary evils in order to experience redemption.

Paranoia

My purpose in writing now is the same as it has always been: to keep myself in a sane state of mind. Now, the problem with jotting down every little detail of my insanity is that madness, in and of itself, is something that tends to spread, the more people talk about it. The fact that I am able to understand and empathize with the often frightening, disorienting, and delusional paranoia that accompanies insanity makes me think twice about doing such a thing. You know, for your sake.

But there's a catch, of course. Staying completely silent, both in tongue and in pen, means that my own mental claustrophobia can set in at any point. That's not good. Hitting that stage sends my mind into a panicked sort of place, where confusion reigns above every sensible, rational emotion, and my perception is skewed and often chaotic in its conclusions. Do you know what I am saying? I lose control. Nothing I do, say, think, feel is a decision on my part. I become something completely unrecognizable to myself. And, coincidentally, so does the rest of the world.

Solitude

Space. Time. Breathe in. Breathe out. Begin again. Ask questions directed at the silence inside your room and heart and mind. Do you expect answers? Of course you don't. Answers are make-believe here, figments of your imagination created in order to fill an emptiness born of both desire and hopelessness. You know the truth; secretly, we all do. Humans, by nature, are constant seekers of answers, but we are neither sincere enough, nor strong enough, to seek until we find. We settle. Always, we attempt at contentedness when surrounded by lies fabricated inside of ourselves. Such lack of understanding will doom us in the end, don't you think? So just wallow there, in your silence and in your solitude, and forget your questions. Forget God, forget yourself, forget the world, and its people and their problems. Forget time, space, matter, existence -- and simply die. Die, just like the rest of us. You'll soon see how easy it is.