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La Douleur Exquise

Unrequited Love

By Laura SibleyPublished 6 years ago 4 min read
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The heart wrenching pain of loving someone who is unattainable: La Douleur Exquise. The words when spoken have such a beautiful sound to them. The feeling and the sorrow they carry might be as equally beautiful in their own tragedy.

How many of us have experienced this crippling emotion? It is literally crippling. You feel like someone is cruelly snatching away pieces of the ground, making it increasingly difficult to walk without falling down. It's as if you are frozen in place as you try to push your way through thick air and blur. You can feel the despair oozing from your pores and you're ashamed of it. You are in grief and your grey complexion and puffed up eyes tell everyone who stares at you that you are depressed. Some of them look away and some of them offer you kindness, which makes you cry because you don't deserve it. People are running past you with seemingly no cares in the world and all you can do is watch them and hate yourself for having this thing, whatever it is, wrong with you. Because there must be something wrong with you.

Time is linear and no more so can you feel it, than in this state. Mornings become your sleeping time, if you manage a couple of hours after the night you've spent watching Friends re-runs and burying yourself in a sorry mess of snot filled tissue. You are so tired, so hungry. You cannot really sleep and you can't hold any food down whilst your stomach, heart and gut all churn themselves into a mesh of oneness. You pace. You force yourself to stand up to do nothing because there is nothing that can be done to ease this. You think. You think of nothing but the pain and the numbness that follows because your brain protects your body from suffering more than you can handle and then you feel the pain again. There is a rollercoaster of suffering and nothingness. You think about ways you can make it stop. You know it'll get easier but you don't want to accept that it will because that means letting it go. You have lost all sense of control. All you can do is exist in this sadness.

La Douleur Exquise!

A grief that's torturous because there is never really any closure. There can't be because you have felt this and now it will be a part of you forever. You might heal. You probably will. Is it going to take years? It feels like it won't ever end. Torturous because you hit your mental playback at the points where you fucked things up. You look around in any place and there are fingerprints and echoes in every direction, and you can't escape the memories and now the heartbreak those good ones have caused. You can't listen to music because the melodies fill your being with either anger at yourself or an overwhelming agony that you just can't face. Alcohol seems like a good idea until you have some and it projects itself onto the walls with your pathetic idea of solution and productivity.

You lay in bed. You close your eyes and twist your limbs together to feel safer. You get too hot because it's the middle of the day so you throw your duvet to the side until you get cold again from the panicked heart rate and sweating that follows. There is a heaviness that you struggle to pin point. You can't carry it. You can just witness it and hope that it grows weaker; lightens. Darkness approaches, but you don't notice until you try to scramble around for another cigarette and some painkillers for the shooting sensations in your foggy head. You get angry. You want to fight your way out of this. You scream at them in your head and you feel hateful. Spiteful thoughts take over for a while because you think that's what's going to heal you. Then you hate yourself for getting angry. Self loathing has a comforting familiarity. There is something very wrong with you and you are not a good person.

You realise you haven't showered and you feel sticky and grimy. You've let yourself become so pitiful. It's no wonder this is happening. That's what you believe. You are revolting. You wonder if your silver lining is the weight that you're now losing. You realise how shallow that lining is. Going to the shop isn't an option because those people are everywhere, looking through your bloodshot eyes at how unappetising your energy has become. You are a burden on everyone in this state, even strangers.

Wishing you were better equipped to resolve this concoction of emotion and circumstance. Fuck. You wish so hard.

You write down your anguish. You dream of just a slit of light to creep through and take some of the gloom away. You deny any of this is happening to you to repeat all of the shit above all over again. You notice you have written about someone else. You disassociate. You is not I.

Everyone is sick of you by now. They have all had enough of your bullshit and your drama. Those who show you kindness just don't know you yet. They all disappear eventually.

La Douleur Exquise.

breakups
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