Imagine Me

To the world, she is formidable.

To me?

She is the world.

To the world, she is formidable.

To me?

She is the world.

To the world, she is formidable.
To me?
She is the world.

And then, even though I know it’s going to piss him off, I say to Nazeera:
“Warner and J were engaged.”

“That sounds awful.”

“What does it feel like?”

“I was thinking about how much I love you,”

Warner’s eyes flash. “I want to hurt people all the time,” he says. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night because I’m thinking about all the people I’d like to murder.”

I’d finally walked away from my own pessimism, and the moment I did, life stuck a knife in my back.

It’s easy, during those moments, to throw in the towel. To shrug off humanity. To tell yourself that you tried to be happy, and look what happened: more pain. Worse pain. Betrayed by the world. You realize then that anger is safer than kindness, that isolation is safer than community. You shut everything out. Everyone. But some days, no matter what you do, the pain gets so bad you’d bury yourself alive just to make it stop.

In the early days after Castle took me in, my guard was up so high I couldn’t even see over the top of it. I trusted no one. I believed nothing. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I let anger rock me to sleep at night because being angry was far less scary than having faith in people— or in the future.

I kept waiting for things to fall apart.

I was so sure this happiness and safety wouldn’t last, that Castle would turn me out, or that he’d turn out to be a piece of shit. Abusive. Some kind of monster.