Strangling Fig
It’s so easy to fall back, to clam up and go cold in the face of you. It’s so simple to let the guilt and fear take over and hide me from view. I can just tilt my head and my hair covers my face obscuring the features beneath until I’m only a foggy spot in your view.
But it hurts. It burns like grabbing hot metal on a stove, a bright heat, then a searing pain. It feels like I’m choking on Opportunity, too afraid to swallow. Too scared to eat the banquet that’s laid out for me. It’s whispering into oblivion, hoping you’ll hear me and wonder what I have to say. I’m standing on the ledge, too rooted in place by your words to leap over it. Your net of well-meaning criticisms and directives keep me here, and I have no excuse to justify cutting myself free. Your vine grow in my chest and wrap around my heart and lungs and I can’t breathe, can’t speak. I don’t want to hurt you by telling you how you hurt me.
But it’s easier to accept the pain, to stay rooted in the mud and let my prison grow around me. The limbs of the fig wrap around my arms and legs. They run rough over my skin until callus has built up and the sting fades. As much as it burns and chokes, I feel safe, unseen. Nothing can touch me inside those vines. They shut out the blinding light of voices and expectations.
It’s a painful kind of love. The two of us bumping against each other but rarely locking, two cogs unaligned in a clock. It’s suffocating, but I’d rather have this than lose you entirely. I can take loneliness. I can take the disappointment. I can take my self-doubt and impotent anger to my grave if it means I get to keep you.
If raising my voice means losing you, I’d rather be choked.
I love the analogy of the strangling fig. It powerfully describes the sense of self-destruction.