Time

They say Time Heals All Wounds but I don't feel the wounds inside me healing. I don't feel new skin growing over the gaps you left, flesh knitting together, tendon rebuilding with thin elastic, bone hardening over with rocky uneven marks to indicate where I once was destroyed. 

Time Fades All Wounds, I think. If you live with a pain long enough, you grow accustomed to it. Your pain threshold changes. Your normal adjusts. 

I'm adjusting. I'm moving around the hole inside me full of distrust and betrayal as if it's not there. 

But I can feel it, grasping, wanting to swallow me. I am shoveling care and gentleness into a never-ending pit, frantic to fill it. I kick dirt over a cavern hoping no one will notice it's there. 

How do I let someone else fill it when you left it so empty?

I'm scared he'll see this emptiness. Not because it will frighten him, but because he could use it against me. I'm on the defensive. I'm angry you did that to me. 

He reacts in the slightest way defensively and my radar screams, run. 

You did that to me. 

I do not want to stand here and try to shield this wound. I want to show him and I want him to tell me it's okay, that he'll stand beside me while I fill it. He'll scoop with the shovel, he'll patch with gauze and ointments. He'll make it go away however it takes. 

But I'm scared, and you did that to me.