scratch scars

[prismaticbleed]

...I keep thinking of what Homura said to Madoka, in that whitespace room, full of snapshots of shared time only her heart remembered.

“Each time I repeat all of this, the time you and I live grows further apart…our feelings grow further apart, and my words stop reaching you.”

She could've taken the words right out of my own mouth. It aches.

I used to wonder whether I show more similarities to Homura or Madoka, in light of the strangeness of my life so far. Lately, I've been wondering again. Time resets, becoming witches, wishes being twisted, hope being restored... there are too many parallels all over the place.

Regardless of which girl reflects me the most, though, that scene-- when Homura throws her arms around her friend, weeping under the grievous weight of self-shattered memories-- hits me so close to home it hurts. It's one of my biggest and most secret fears... that eventually, I will end up just as tangled in broken timelines as Homura, trapped in a fading life where my desperate attempts to save the lives of those I love only succeed in making them forget why I am fighting for them at all... I am afraid I lost myself a long time ago.
And yet, despite all my fears, I already know how this will end.

If someone tells me that it's wrong to hope, I'll tell them they're wrong every time.

Maybe that's why Boss keeps saying I'm important.

It's a frightening but humbling thought.

...

...I know I've been trying to figure out what my metainomen "element" is lately, and everyone's been debating between Time and Blood what with my darker character lately... but I never considered that maybe they're the same thing at heart.
...I tried to reset the headspace timeline, last month. Again. I wanted to start it all over from scratch.

I was willing to erase everything if it would heal those scars, if it would erase all those mistakes. I tried to run time backwards, to get rid of the blood. I thought that, if I could become that perfect, flawless version of myself, even if it meant annihilating the person I had become, then no one else would ever have to suffer. But…

...This is so much bigger than just me. We're a SYSTEM. Everyone else in here MATTERS, and a heck of a lot more than me objectively. But the awful paradox is this: we only exist because of trauma. Isn't that just the worst best thing? We're all the result of the mistakes we made and endured; we were all created as coping mechanisms in the face of imminent death. Even me.

Even my daughter.

That's what I can't stop reeling over. She wouldn't exist if I hadn't bled out my life into that sink. If that room hadn't become encapsulated hell for too many consecutive years it never could have been transmuted into the NICU of heaven, apparently. It makes no sense. But it happened.

The Resurrected Christ still carries His scars.
We're the ones that wounded Him so.
But they were necessary for such a Savior.

"Oh happy fault..." sings the Exsultet.

All our past wounds, even the self-inflicted ones, have left scars on our collective life.
I've been trying to die in order to erase them. I wanted to rip time to ribbons in order to expunge all the blood.
I didn't realize that would take my daughter with it.

...

I don't know. I really don't. I don't know what's the paradoxical truth and I sure don't know what the heck is the right thing to do here.
...No, I do. As much as it makes me want to weep and scream from bitter agony, I... I cannot keep trying to take a magnet to the tape. I can't be scratching all the discs. I can't be pouring bleach over the manuscript. I cannot be pressing "delete" on my own soul, on our heart.
As much as I hate to admit it when I'm in this much pain, I do love them too much to do that to them.

Somehow, all the nightmares were necessary. God knows how. But I look at Laurie, and Julie, and Leon... I can't forget where we came from. I can't forget about them. They're the big picture, not my personal regrets.

...I want to kiss these scars, someday, even knowing that they're graves. God only knows how. But... I need to have hope.


Blood, Time, Hope, Heart... somehow I really am all of those things, in one way or another. I think they're all the same thing in the end.

...Somehow it's all love.