swordofguts

[swordofguts]

Proving a point to my boyfriend.

PLEASE REBLOG if you (male or female) believe it is perfectly okay and natural for a guy of any age to cry

[swordofguts]

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual Trauma

Wake up, eat, work, watch tv, go to bed, rehash for a year. When that becomes your life you end up with a lot of time to reflect. Maybe living life fast enough makes you miss opportunities and waste the ones given to you. Maybe a relationship founded on antagonism can’t ever last. The phrase, ‘words hurt’, ends up meaning more when you get used to hitting someone where the callouses have built up, but what happens when you miss and hit a nerve.

You make up and promise to start over again until the next nerve gets hit. Your goals for success are drifting apart and are now reaching a point of irreconcilability. The breakup comes over text. Your unspoken fear is that they’re afraid of you. They say they can’t put in the effort anymore and hope you understand. They want to stay friends, really.

You both know that's a lie. There’s been too many secrets shared that have created too much baggage for this to go back to being a friendship again.

You discover from one of the few people you’re still in contact with that she got on a dating app a week after your breakup. That year-long relationship didn’t mean more than a pile of Clydesdale horse shit.

Friends reach out. They say they always knew she was bad news. That they never liked her anyway. That you're better off. You tell yourself you believe it. That’s the second lie you know is a lie as you're saying it. Your friend group feels increasingly untenable since your now former lover is a mutual friend with them.

As a worker in the film industry you try to focus on your career but then a pair of strikes happen and your livelihood gets shut down. Your life is now on pause with one thing dominating your thoughts. You pick up a delivery app job to pay the bills in the meantime, but that leaves you with more unfilled silence that you inevitably fill with what-could-have-beens and what-I-could-have-done-differently.

You’ve always kept most people at a six foot distance. Growing up you got too used to being the butt of most jokes so you cope by putting up a giant black veil over your personal life. You reason that what people don’t know can’t be used against you.

You had that barrier, but what the hell, aren’t you supposed to confide everything in your partner? So you share everything. Your hopes and fears, even the ugly things you’ve never shown anyone else. That kid from when you were 12 that put his hands where you didn’t want them. The ways in which the impact has made you feel uncomfortable in the bedroom.

It doesn’t take long after the breakup for you to discover that she’s given this information out to people outside of the relationship. Apparently she was frustrated in bed and decided to vent to strangers about it.

You let the barrier down, but it turns out it was just a trojan horse.

Growing up you had a father who wanted the best for you, but that best ended up being up feeling always out of reach. He had a temper that always seemed to get aimed at you. So you grow up with the vow that you’ll never have a temper like an H bomb.

She tells you you have blue eyes that look like hurricane formations or calm oceans on a dime. You wonder whether or not those were words of adoration or caution now. You didn’t outgrow the man with a temper, you just lived long enough to become him.

But there is hope (as I’m writing this with three months left in the year) in this life. Tonight I reconnected with an old friend from back when I had a real life. We go to a concert for the music from Spider-Man Into The Spider Verse together. We talk about our lives lived with hopes and fears, regrets and successes. You realize that all those relationships that you thought had been tainted were really still always there. You just had to take that leap of faith.

You don’t know where this road you’re on is going to take you or whether you’ll enjoy every bump or snag. You don’t know where you stand in this industry and your place in it has never felt more uncertain. You are, however, sure of one thing. You will always possess the power to put one foot in front of the other, to carry on in the face of all that insists you turn back. For that is the capacity allows us all to live the lives we deserve. Someone else will come along that you’ll be able to share your burdens with. You will live in the light of tomorrow instead of the twilight of yesterday. You will live and you will love.