Numb
by Samantha
Rating: R
Disclaimer: The lyrics belong to NIN "hurt".
Notes: A little bit of inner monolouge, take from
whoever's view you want.
Feedback: Please.
::I hurt myself today To see if I still feel I focus on the pain The only thing that's real::
Numb: adj
1. Deprived of the power to feel or move normally
2. Emotionally unresponsive; indifferent
The ability to feel, it comprises our whole humanity doesn’t it? To have feelings about others, to love, to hate, to care. So many of us hate every minute of what makes us human.
Take me for example. I hold back, keep just far enough away from others to never worry about getting sucked in by feelings. A safe distance from human weakness. Sure, when I was little I felt things, I loved people and they all went away. I learned early how to let the numb creep in, how all emotions were weakness.
It was my father who taught me that, anytime I cried he would just hit me harder; push himself in just a little bit deeper.
“I just want to taste your tears,” he’d promise. When I stopped crying he lost interest, sadistic fuck.
So you stop caring, and suddenly every feeling, every physical feeling is so much more intense because it’s all you have. Eating, sex, fire, it's all so intense and you live for it. An accidental scratch and you find yourself sliding the knife across your wrist because the pain is so real.
If you don’t let yourself care, you never develop expectations; people can never disappoint you because you figure they are all out for themselves. You can make them do whatever you want them to because you’re not worrying if they’ll be there in the morning. The world is full of people to be there in the morning, get rid of one and another is crawling into their place before the bed is cold.
Of course if you spend your whole life practicing to not care, then the person who really crawls inside you, claws their way into your very soul, twisting around your spinal cord and nestling into your belly can really fuck you up. Because suddenly you care and it frightens the shit out of you, and you try so hard to do anything to just push them away, and they just won't leave.
What frightens you most is by caring you give them control.
That’s really the thing you’ve been trying to so hard to hold on to. Control. And now they are the ones holding all the strings, a jerk here and they turn you upside down. But you care now, so even if you hate it, you can’t push them away, a part of you begins to love the way they twist you up inside, the way they make you cry, and burn with life.
Everyone knows candles don’t burn long though, and loving turns to hating because it’s the only emotion you’ve ever let in. It’s the only one that can even begin to compare to the intensity of love. And so you fight, and you scream and you yell, and you are shocked by how much you still care.
Slowly, coldly, you feel the numbness spider crawling back in, emotions shutting down one by one. And it is so welcome at this point, because god it is so exhausting to care, to take chances and put yourself out on the line like that. You can back off now, slide back to where you were before, safe and alone.
Everyone watches you go with a feeling of awe. They worry about you, and you push them away and half of them is so sad to see you this way. The other half just wishes it could go with you, to stop living emotion to emotion, instead live action to action they way you’ve learned to.
And you’re back where you started; shattered to a million pieces inside yourself, cuts so deep they don’t even hurt anymore. A strange man shoving himself against you, telling you how much he wants to taste you.
You lay in bed alone at night inches from someone else as numb as you, and all you can think about is her.