Breaking point

You know it when you get there — that space where nothing anyone else’s pain can do to you could be worse than what you’re doing to yourself.

It’s a different and even exhilarating sort of liminal space — just as hard to get out of, consciously, as the previous one, but suddenly more tantalizingly, indulgently justified.

You know damn well that the muscle memory remains, despite the logic — the logic that it’s safe to leave now. And the muscle memory is probably right, because the logic applies only to you.

You know damn well that whatever you do to yourself — and whatever guilt they perform as a result— will only fly back in your face and become your own, as it always does.

You’re self-aware in this space, even moreso than usual, and you realize that you have to stop.

Perhaps you can’t stop in this moment— you just got here, after all, and you still need to function tomorrow and there’s never a good time to leave and, dammit, it’s at least a different limbo, right?

— and so you wallow a bit.

You’re still stuck, of course, but you take a secret pleasure in the creeping realization that a drink or a tic or a tense moment might truly take you over that verbal cliff this time, and finally set you free.

Or at least into a free fall that can’t hurt you any worse than the fallout.