The Art Of Just Getting By

The mastery of existing- in part.

Those who have fallen halfway out of love, but stumbled and caught their foot on the way down. Those whose bruises have faded and tears have dried, but scars still linger like souvenirs from someone we left eighty-seven yesterdays ago. Those who have long pretended to be past their heartache, the victims of “should-be-over-it-by-nows”. Your heart isn’t shattered, but it just doesn’t sit in your chest like it used to. Its strings are tangled around your gut — tugged every time you see them smiling, because you know it has nothing to do with you. And that’s when you realize what it’s like to become a memory to someone who you once splashed across every corner of your future. Someone who once finger painted you into the crevasses of every plan.

The loneliness was a cigarette drag that you never wanted to take. It stung the back of your throat, tense lips trying to exhale their name one last time – but all that came out was smoke. It’s scent still clings to familiar places, uninvited, fogging your memory. But time has turned its taste stale, twisted it beyond recognition. Ever so slowly, solitude starts resembling something a lot like salvation.

Still, there’s no fighting the cruel side of 2am, waiting for the bad days and the weak nights. It feeds off of the times you’re only just scraping by.

You see how it was created for picking apart the vulnerable pieces you spent all day frantically holding in place. You feel it push you in ways you were never meant to bend, and smile the whole way through it. You let it fill your mind with beliefs that maybe you just never were quite good enough. You hear it hiss lies in your ear, convincing you that it’s possible to be okay with feeling so. fucking. damaged.

And the worst part of it all, is that you don’t even want them back. The one that’s left you hanging halfway to healed? They don’t even exist anymore. You’ve fallen sick and the only antidote has long ago run dry- so you learn to live with the symptoms, identify as the disease. You wear the itching emptiness underneath your skin convincing yourself no one will notice- and maybe they wont.

Because after all, you-should-be-over-it-by-now

Getting by never comes easily.

But the art of this all comes clenched in the white-knuckled hands of hope. You’re clinging to the idea that some day you will make it to 3am and realize how long it’s been since they crept across your mind. You get high on the belief that this is only a phase in time, and like all else, it will pass. You wait patiently for the silver linings hidden around unsuspecting corners, from bandaid shaped lips placed on people with purpose. You have faith that someday happiness will spill over you like beams of sunlight kissing your skin and flooding your mind with reasons why every damn reckless heartache was absolutely mandatory.

Because the truth is, the art of getting by is fleeting, and you can’t practice it forever. It will expire. Hang tight with blistering hands. Eventually instead of just getting by each day- you won’t dare let a day just get by you.