Hidden Shell

There’s a part of me that’s dead now.

It still exists, but it’s blackened around the edges, and it will never live again.

Numb, and useless,

any sensation killed by emotional neuropathy.

I carry it around like dead weight,

unable to cut it from the parts of me that are living.

It is a part of my cellular structure,

the same as veins and arteries, but nothing flows.

I try daily to build a wall around it,

so that its darkness doesn’t creep vines into the parts of me still living.

It was killed off by the hard part of life.

The trauma.

The heartbreak.

The grief, loss, and shame that come with living for any period of time.

I didn’t notice when it started dying,

Just that one day it ceased to breathe,

And stopped reaching for the light.

It lingers there,

A hollow ache inside my chest,

An occasional pain below my ribs,

And now it refuses any bit of color that attempts to seep in.

I used to press it, to see if a little shade would return,

Like pressing the skin when your leg is numb,

A test to see if any feeling can return.

It was fruitless, and it remains still.

There, but unmoving.

Still, the rest of me continues.

Breathing.

Living.

Full of light and the shades of the rainbow.

Parts that still stretch towards the sun,

Sometimes aching yes, but still feeling,

Still opening trembling hands towards whatever God has in store.

So I carry both,

The living and the lost,

The blooming and the buried.

Maybe that is what survival looks like:

Not wholeness,

Not healing in the way we imagined, or as textbooks describe.

Instead, learning how to carry what will never live again,

Without letting it take everything else with it.