justifications

prose

i wrote this about an incredibly vulnerable time in my life. and i feel like i want to share it so, here you go. during this time i had to shove my vulnerability a side. so i guess this might be me just trying to reclaim my vulnerability.

i used to translate his behaviour for myself. every raised voice arrived distorted, travelling through the spiral of my cochlea before reaching my thoughts, where i carefully reinterpreted it. what began as shouting was softened into something manageable.

its okay, i would tell myself. we are just learning how to communicate.

but the lesson was never really learned.

his insults cut cleanly, and i dressed my wounds in explanations. bandaged with he is just having a bad day. yet the "bad day" edged a week, then another, until i could no longer tell where the excuse ended and the graze began.

somewhere along the way, i had normalised it.

i told myself there was an unprocessed part of him speaking - a wounded place that sharpened his words. and there was an undermining part of me that rushed to defend him, translating everything again and again into the same quiet refrain : its okay, its not his fault. 

eventually i realised the distortion wasn't just coming from him. it was coming from me. i had been adjusting the signal, filtering the noise, convincing myself the frequency was normal when it clearly wasn't. 

and so, the fault was mine.

fault auditory processing. 

but awareness changes the way you hear things. i began to listen differently - cautiously, deliberately - widening the dynamic range of what i allowed myself to recognise. i stopped tuning myself into his frequency simply because it was loud. 

and when i finally heard him clearly, the sound lingered in the delicate hairs of my inner ear like a church bell struck to hard - a high persistent ringing.

tinnitus.

clearer than silence.

after that, there was no more forgetting. no more softening the signal. no more retrograde amnesia disguised under pretty people pleaser.

whoever was left behind - unfamiliar. but she is brand new, and i think i'm ready to meet her.