healing is not linear.

 Healing is not linear. Healing is melting ice and refreezing it, and setting a forest ablaze just to put it back out. It's growing a garden just to watch the drought kill everything you created. It's mapping your way out, just to get lost among the trees anyway. 

 Healing is breaking down every wall, watching them dissipate under the heat of your own stare. Melting ice. You try and try to let down those walls, to feel the pain and anguish, to process through and out of this dark tunnel of lonely emotion swallowing silence. Melting ice. You question yourself, and try to gaslight yourself into thinking it couldn't have hurt that bad, it wasn't that serious, I'm being overdramatic. Melting ice. You tell yourself it's okay to melt the ice, to watch the walls fall, to accept that maybe sometimes things are just meant to happen. Maybe I'm meant to feel this way. Melting ice. 

  Although the melted ice is kept in a nice and tidy box, shaking like lighting hit it, it seeks out the cold. It seeks to be refrozen, and form a solid, freezing wall. It wishes to be strong and firm in a way that allows not a single drop of feeling. It wishes to be tall enough to block the tsunami of tears and heartache. That tsunami is a mass made up of every traumatic experience, all the breakups, all the times you asked god why and got silence in return. As that tsunami gets bigger, so does your disdain for the ocean. With that, you build the wall up again and again, higher and higher. You are like a fortress, keeping yourself hidden and protected from anyone that could possibly do harm. You are like a mountain, unwavering against the storm.

 You are not only the mountain, but the trees. You are tall, and outgoing, extending a branch to anyone who needs it, without second guessing it. You move with the wind, but it never knocks you down. You dance in the rain, and hold the water on your skin like it belongs there. But you are the trees. You are too high for anyone to reach you, stuck with your head in the clouds. So high that when lightning struck down you didn't feel it. That high up, it takes you forever to realize the flames are engulfing you. So strong-willed, that you thought you could win against the flames. You thought the fire couldn't take you out if you didn't particularly feel the burn. But it chars you through and through. By the time the rain comes, you're black and brown and burnt to the core. Still high but without dancing limbs and colorful expression in the way you move. You are no longer a mountain of trees, but a desert hill with a single cactus, afraid to let anyone touch or get too close, thirsting for affection and love. 

 But that desert, used to be a garden, you grew it. You planted flowers of every color, worked through every emotion, watered every painful memory. Gave it your all to do the right steps, and watch yourself bloom. But that drought came without warning, like an empty vessel of emotion you can't feel, ran through the garden you created and sucked up every ounce of everything. No flower left untouched, you were sucked dry of the sadness, and the love, even the anger and the confusion. You were a blank canvas of unpainted flowers and white skies and white trees. Void of everything you worked so hard for. The drought feels like emptiness and despair but it's the kind of despair that lies beneath the surface. Like it wants to be felt, it wants to be heard, and it's screaming at you from the bottom of your heart but you just can't reach it. 

 You can try and try to map yourself a way out of the trees, and across the desert through your now dead garden, but you'll still get lost. You'll be lost among the trees and turning in circles trying to remember what the world looked like from that high up. You'll wander aimlessly through the remnants of the black and brown ash colored forest. If you make it through, you'll find yourself stumbling through the sandy hills of the desert, emptiness swallowing you for miles and miles. You cannot map a way out of your own mind, this empty desert is the land you own, and the home you chose. The dust blowing around in your mind is your own doing, the lack of silence that you've created cannot be calmed. You have trapped yourself inside your own walls. No one but you and your own thoughts kicking the sand around till the wind catches it and it's carried through the forest, over your dead garden and between your charred trees. Eventually those grains of sand your kicking, your thoughts, they hit a wall. The wall you built yourself. One on each side, to keep everyone else out. Or is it to keep yourself in? Do you find solace in the char and dry air? Peace in the tsunami that chooses to attack or be at bay depending on the day? Do you feel most safe locked safe inside your own head where the only person who can hurt you is yourself? Do you feel perfectly guarded by hiding like a little girl behind your own walls with your back pressed against what's left of your favorite tree, favorite memory. Do you hold a dead flower, and try to repaint it while you hide behind that wall? How is that little girl ever supposed to grow up if you keep her hidden from the world? Healing is not linear, but healing is not hiding either. Feel it all, replant the flowers, put out the fire, swim in the tsunami, let the desert swallow you up in the sand. Let the emotions envelop you and spit you out into the world. Be overtaken by the pain and climb over your own walls, scale them like your own damn super-hero. Then, you build a door. You keep the walls up, but open to those who deserve to know you. Those walls are the home you built, and sometimes you can let people in, and they might just help you put out the next fire, and plant the next garden.