250 Days.

Two hundred and fifty days.

I have not put myself through that pain for eight months and eleven days, but I miss it like my grandmother’s heavy quilt blanket on a winter night.

Horrifyingly described and scarring to those who would know, I never minded it. I have the urge still, late into the night, while the stars sing to each other, and I am the only one in the audience. When I cannot stand being in my bed, resisting sleep, tired because I can’t.

I haven’t done it.

Proud of myself, I am, but a worse part of myself never cared about being proud.

It never cared for the hurt or the scars. It never considered the time that I spent patching myself up after the tears finished falling as wasted. Rolling its eyes when I flinched in pain, chuckling as I covered myself up in all the ways that I could. It didn’t mind it then and it whispers to me that it would never mind it now.

I have become quite good at drowning it out; between the music and the phone calls, using my fingers to write my papers and my poems instead, I ignore it. Less than a year later but more than a half, I’ve got other habits now, but I’ve not gone back there.

Its familiarity calls out to me, it screams my name when it knows I’m alone, it sings me lullabies when acid rain streams down my face, but I’ve made my escape and I have to remind myself why I did.

I wish the better part of me was stronger, I wish it better remembered the days in which I hurt and that it counted the ones in which I kept myself from it. I wish it could shower me with pride and let me hug my accomplishments to sleep. Instead, it clings onto the promise of the future, imagining the next time I might need the devil on my shoulder.

After all, the angel is weak, and she is falling asleep, I am jealous, but I am holding back. Lucky me, I am so strong.

Am I?