BROKEN

You never forget about being broken. You never forget that whoever or whatever you are now, you’re still a product of a broken family. You get by everyday and you may tend to ignore it but it will always be there at the back of your mind, a niggling reminder, just as it will be there mixed with the scent of air you breathe, sharp and stinging. You’re broken. There’s no getting past that, there’s no covering it up because that’s what cowards do and you detest being one. There’s just you living with it and wearing it at your sleeves. The thing is, living with it means you can never be ordinary or simple or mundane. It kind of changes you and warps you depending how you deal with it—how your faculties decide whether or not to engage in offense or defense like an antibody when faced with a buggering antigen. Being broken becomes a part of you that it takes one of the faces you wear, becomes one of the circles that you live every single day. It’s a habit, it’s a skin and with days passing by, you learn not to zone in on it. It’s always at the background, just a white buzzing noise that slides in and out of your attention. This is what today’s entry is about then.

Because it takes one phone call from my sister and once again being broken is at the forefront of my mind, becoming the sole focus, the pillar, the center, the core, whatever bloody word you’d deign to describe it. It’s at these times that I forget my person and only think about the bit where I’m just one of the results of a family broken from within. The images are like water bathing me, cascading on every inch of my skin, and the guilt and the sorrow clawing cruelly on a very much already battered flesh. There’s no use getting past the experience or trying to avoid it. There’s just enduring and braving every minute of it, bearing it like an obliged masochist bound and loving the slices of whip against meat. You relieve it as the moment calls for it. That’s how you pay tribute and respect to the Past.

Don’t misunderstand. Pity is never something I wish from anybody. I’m not embarrassed by it nor do I think I’m a poorer person because of it. It’s just the way things are. It makes me the person I am today. Molded me with hands of iron and sharpened that which were necessary how one perceives the world. And I rather like myself now so no matter how bitter the past is and no matter how my hands were stained with blood and my mouth beaded with poison before and no matter how irrevocably detestable I was some years back, there’s just no way I can hope I’d rather that things could have been different. I wouldn't hope to change the past even if it meant our family would be whole and my siblings and I free from the stigmata carried by children of separated parents. For all I care, the nosy and pretentious neighbors could roger themselves up trying to make our situation worse than it really is.