Why Did I Jump?

My nails bleed, and I clench my jaw, my arms burn as I slowly make my way to the lip of the cliff that I had jumped off months ago. I had decided that being within my void was better than walking around it trying to seal it from the surface. I had every intention of going in with a good purpose. The purpose to heal and learn and come back out as it closes. Slowly, easily. Using the leverage to raise me to the surface. But I was wrong.

I was wrong to just jump in with expectations of the task being easy. I thought it was just a hole that all my bad, pain, and trauma that had been created over the years. I didn’t know my void would have grasp, would have clung to those memories and incidents. To try and fight through them all again. However, that is what happened and I couldn’t find the way out. Living with them the first time, there was pleasure, joy, happiness mixed in between because of the small moments I was able to focus on in the first round. But jumping back in feet first? The void doesn’t hold the good, doesn’t remember or have purpose for good.

The good only closes the void, helps heal the void, in a different way, so of course it wouldn’t hold on to it. Of course it would not allow the good in. It was stripped from me as I fell. So deep and dark, I couldn’t figure out which way was up or down, left or right, until the memories started assaulting me. Starting pulling me in every direction for my attention, for my viewing and participation. Begging to be seen and experienced again, and again.

The difference this time was that I knew what would happen, I was able to predict and try to change the outcome. But it was already in stone because it had already been lived. So even as my hope to change and heal the void from within, was ripped away quickly from the onslaught, I was trapped. At one point I forgot I was trying to get out, trying to fix it. So dark and damaged, how could I even try to find a light when there was nothing down here but emptiness.

Until I cracked my head against something that wasn’t there. The thud pushed my head back, and I felt the jagged edge. The wall in the memory was nowhere near me, so there shouldn’t have been anything to hit my head on. But there was, and I turned and grasped and dug my finger tips into it and slowly pulled myself up. Feeling the grasp of the memories, wrap around my torso and legs. Ripping my clothes and flesh, not wanting to be left alone, not wanting to stay down in the void, that they could never leave. But I could.

I did. I pulled myself up over that cliff edge, chest heaving, muscles tight and aching, clothes ripped and flesh bleeding, from the monsters and jagged wall. I lay there, eyes open taking in the light that poured down on me. Why couldn’t this light reach the bottom of my void? Why wasn’t it a shallow puddle and could have been dried up by this light? The light that warms my skin and caresses the sore flesh that is slowly clotting and mending together. Scares forming, to remind me not to do that again.

a big dark pit in the middle of the forest