manipulation

I sat down with her, on many occasions, and she told me her story.

I remember watching as she spilled the things she'd been feeling in her stomach,

the things she'd been thinking in her head for all the years I thought I'd known her for. 

Through conversations, I listened and I feel like not much of what I say now can reflect the pain she expressed to me, but this is the best way to interpret what she told me. 

The thoughts in her head found a clever way to infiltrate and bring their manipulation; 

a fragile woman in a flowery dress struggling through the intoxication 

brought on by the head in which she was imprisoned.

The alcohol she consumed until she was ready to payback in the form of tears and attempts at hurting herself.

In the search to appease the demons in her head, she lay on a sterile surface in the bathroom after the consumption of the pills she was all too familiar with. 

Looking into a half cracked half empty mirror hoping she doesn’t reflect 

that half cracked and half empty receding stain of a smile her mother made when she left. 

It seems that the promises she made to herself seemed to be the hardest ones to keep 

and knowing she survived the last storm was no longer all she needed to be able to fall asleep. 

Empty wine glasses and late night breakdowns symbolic of her vessel with no presentation, 

but a spirit starving for remembrance some sort of legacy other than her occupation. 

She was reminiscent of those times that she would have those late night cries; 

those moments when she would look back and say “How did I get here?”

Those moments when she would look at old childhood photos and say “How did that child grow up to be like this?” 

And she looks at photos of her happy self in her youth and is envious of that smile she had when she was twenty-two.

She wishes she could go back, away from the life she now lives in her own self-perpetuated hell. 

Because she took the literal stains and the literal scars and turned them into the emotional drain and then she fell apart. 

"I live with the philosophy that forgiveness needs to be put in place for someone to actually grow from negative emotions, 

and constructive use of the pain that’s thrown at you is the only way to find refuge. 

So I’m going to tell you this, darling, every time you tell yourself that you’re not worth it, 

every time you tell yourself that you’re worthless, you’re being lied to. 

And in that case, the liar is you."

Author's Note

Ending paragraph taken from a song by 'Hotel Books' but summed it all up nicely.

Not about anyone in particular.