I’ve been an angry person my entire life, even if others will tell otherwise. My friends see kindness, compassion, and empathy. My family calls me “sweet” and “delicate”, a fragile flower who is too sensitive for the world around her.
They don’t see how I drown in my own rage.
It was there when I was younger, that rolling wave of heat that hit me in the gut, making me scream and wail and cry. I’d get shoved into my room by my parents, not wanting to deal with what the underlying cause was, couldn’t be bothered to figure what led to this state. Trapped in my room, I’d kick the walls, bawling my eyes out until the tears stopped and the heat cooled, until I was “calm”.
I learned very young how to bottle my rage.
The rage wasn’t as bad back then; it was manageable. I put myself in a position of civility, called myself Switzerland. I became the problem solver, the mediator, the de-escalator. On occasion, the rage would build over time, and then that white-hot feeling would explode out of me right onto the face of the one who caused it.
Amusingly, this explosiveness is how I got my nickname: Emilzebub, my favorite one of many. My own identity mixed with that of the devil himself, Beelzebub. I liked it, it suited a part of me that often went unnoticed- and so it stuck.
I took for granted how much easier it was back then. When my anger wasn’t explosive, it was a positive. It motivated me and taught me not to let others treat me like shit. It wasn’t until her that everything changed.
She was one of my best friends. She had this way of making you feel like you were special, the center of her entire universe, that you were important. She repeatedly called me her soulmate. She told me she loved me over and over. She was the first close friend I platonically could touch, something I’d craved, starved for the feeling of another’s warmth but too awkward to seek it out.
At the time, I was insecure, and being so vulnerable and having someone make you feel like you are everything- it’s intoxicating, so much so that I ignored the warning signs. That I was going to be hurt worse than I ever had before, something I never conceived of being possible. And that she would be the one to do it.
My former best friend, out jealousy and projected anger, tried to ruin my life. She lied, manipulated, did everything in her power to try to get our best friends to hate me, to get rid of me. This vile behavior went on for about a year behind my back.
I am the perceptive type, I knew something was wrong, and I knew there were things she was lying about, but I didn’t think it would be as bad as it was. I didn’t think someone who once claimed to care about you could turn on you like that. I trusted her because I loved her. But I was so, so wrong.
She was the first person to ever break my heart.
Ever since the revelation of what she had done, I changed for the worse. My rage, my bitterness, it suffocates me. Every day, constantly, I feel like I’m drowning while being burnt alive from the inside. My moments of reprieve of these feelings are brief, and soon I’m pulled back under, completely submerged in feelings of hate.
I haven’t felt truly happy in a very long time.
I hate feeling this way, I hate that I hate so constantly. The burning inside, sometimes I feel the impulse to draw it out—that maybe making the feeling external will release it. I don’t, even when every part of me inside is screaming at me to burn, burn, just burn the pain away. I guess I have to give some thanks to my parent’s laziness when it came to dealing with me in this case, because I ignore it. Bottle it like everything else, a Molotov cocktail in the making.
They say time heals wounds, but two years have passed since her. These feelings have not left me. My mind won’t let me learn to let go, even though that’s the very thing I want. Just let me let go. I’d do anything if it meant these feelings would just go away, purge it from my mind, my veins, my heart.
I want to stop drowning. I’d rather permanently drown, in the literal sense: not figuratively. Let water rush inside every part of me until my fire turns cold. The figurative is just on the horizon of my mind, I can feel it, and I am afraid.