On Terror

I want to forget about you so badly.  You are the first thing I think about every morning and the last thing I think about every night.  I reach out to the side of the bed that you used to sleep on and find it empty, the tears follow shortly after.  They tell me in group that I am supposed to let you go, accept what has happened and move on.  The trouble is that I seem unable to.

I have never had this problem before and it terrifies me that I am powerless over your control on my mind.  Even from a thousand miles away you have a death grip on me.  I feel your hand tightening around my throat as I lie in my bed, robbing the breath from my lungs.  I try to exercise the deep breathing techniques to calm myself down that I have learned and sooner or later I drift off to sleep.  Sleep, my greatest fear.

When my eyes close the real terror begins and it refuses to let me go.  I see you every single fucking night in my dreams, or nightmares to be more accurate.  You laugh at me, throw stones at me and usually end up literally ripping out my heart and eating it in front of me.  The trouble is that I do not wake up, the terror grips me and does not let me go.  When I do wake up I find my throat sore from screaming while I was under.  The dreams have been getting worse with each passing night and each day they seem to define my first few hours awake.  They are so real that I have trouble distinguishing reality from my dreams.  I pinch myself constantly to see if I am awake, I know that is not normal.  I feel like I am living waking life, not knowing if what is happening is real or a dream.  It is an utterly terrifying feeling.

Last night we were both in a house that was square shaped, with an opening in the middle so you could see across to the other side.  I was lying in a room full of broken glass, rolling around in agony and losing blood rapidly.  I remember calling out to you as you watched me from the landing on the other side of the house.  You were laughing hysterically as I bled out.  The last thing I remember from the "dream" was you walking around the landing to stand above me.  "You did this to yourself," you said.  I woke up covered in sweat and out of breath, completely terrified. 

The thing that bothers me, and I know causes these nightmares, is that you do not care.  You want to pretend I never existed, that these three years we shared together never happened.  To you I am just a piece of roadkill in your rear-view mirror, to me you are the thing I miss the most.  I cannot tell you the pain this causes me, the detriment to my mental health it causes and the desire to get high that it constantly lays on my mind.  I want forgiveness.  I want you to say that you understand.  I want so much from you that I know I will never get and my sub-conscious is not letting me forget it.  I know I will never hold you again and am coming to terms with that, but not talking to you is so painful.  To not be able to tell you how I feel and how sorry I am is absolutely killing me.  I feel it eating away at me every single moment of every single day.  Sooner or later there will be nothing left of me.  You once told me you were scared of the power I had over your heart.  I am terrified of the power you hold over me to this day.  I wonder if you always will.

I wish I had someone I could talk to about this terror.  It has a stranglehold on my life and is keeping me from healing from the deepest wound I have ever suffered.  I wish someone understood how this felt, plenty of people tell me that they do, but I know they do not.  They may know some of it, but only I am trapped in my head.  Only I see these nightmares.  Only I feel this pain.  I know you bury it, but for me it is always just below the surface just waiting to drown me again.  I am so confused.  You torment me every night and I cannot let you go because of it.  I wish I could be like you, just cutting me out of your life and forgetting me, but I don't want to.  You are too special to me, I still love you and I always will.

To me that is the definition of terror.