Finding Freedom
I am someone who loved reading and writing. I don't claim to be any good, but it is a passion of mine. I just got out of an abusive relationship, and decided to use that as motivation to write for the first time in a while.
When we met, you gave me a key.
Not a key to your heart, but one to a house. I equated it to being the same.
It was a house I had never seen before.
With love in your eyes, you told me to sit in that house and wait for you. Without question, I did.
Every day, I waited.
You were scarce. You were unpredictable.
Some days, you would enter the house, and my heart would flutter. I finally wasn’t alone, we were together in a home. However, you always left again.
As time went on, things began to shift. Suddenly on the days you were there, you weren’t. The home I thought we'd built became a house again.
I was losing you the way I was slowly losing myself, yet I was too blind to realize it.
Sitting in the darkness, I would look out the windows. Outside there was brightness. There were smiles. Laughter. Happiness existed beyond the walls I was trapped inside.
I didn’t realize I was trapped. I sold the lie to myself “that is happiness, and that is what I will get, when this house finally becomes a home again.”
As time went on, the cracks in the foundation of the house mocked me. The darkness of the rooms consumed me. There was life outside of these walls, staring me in the face, and I was blinded.
Days, weeks, years went on.
I slowly realized the house was not a house, a home, a place of solace. It was a prison, a prison that was built around me.
The love was a prison that had locked me away from the world.
There was a Monday morning where sunlight peaked in through the blinds. For the first time in a long time, I felt my mind wake up, my body craving the rays creating lines on the cold floor.
Despite having the key all along, I never had the ability to use it. Finally I stuck my key in the door, opened it, and stepped into the light. The house disappeared, and my freedom returned.