When No One Sees You Hurting

When No One Sees You Hurting

Not every pain needs a tear,

and not every broken person knows how to say: "I am broken."

There are pains that learn to hide so well...

You sit with people and laugh,

you answer when they ask you,

and you say: "I am fine."

Then you return to your solitude,

and all the masks fall from your face at once.

Some people do not cry because they are strong,

but because they are tired of explaining why they are crying.

The day goes by as normal in everyone's eyes,

while there is a person carrying inside him a funeral no one knows about.

And as the poetess said:

Alone I walk, and no path comforts me

Alone I weep, and no heart calls to me

Alone I carry sorrows in my chest

Alone, even the echo of my voice comforts me

Alone, and the night knows how much I suffer

Alone, and the wound in my silence hides me

Alone, I have no one left among people

Alone... and death, if it called me, would be enough for me

The cruelest thing about wrongdoing is that the wronged person does not carry the pain alone...

but he carries with him endless questions:

Why me?

Why did you do that?

Did you not see my heart when you were hurting it?

Did you not hear my voice when I told you I am tired?

Was there not a single thing between us worth you stopping for?

Then comes a stage when a person no longer wants an answer.

For the heart may grow more tired of asking than of the answer.

And he begins to understand a painful truth:

Some of those from whom we wait for an explanation do not have enough courage to admit that they were the cause of our pain.

"What hurts most in wrongdoing is not that someone hurts you, but that you discover you deserved mercy from him, and he knew it... then chose to hurt you."

And there is something else no one talks about...

that the wronged person may forgive one day,

but that does not mean his memory will erase everything.

For forgiveness is not a machine that erases the past.

You may say:

"I have forgiven."

And your heart still remembers.

And you may hold no grudge against the one who wronged you,

but you will never be the person you were before him.

And that is not weakness.

For a scar does not mean the wound is still bleeding...

it is only proof that something happened,

and that you survived it.

A pause.....

Do not make forgiveness a duty for a heart that has not yet healed.

Some hearts first need to be allowed to grieve, before they are asked to forgive.

And at the end of the night...

when everyone is asleep,

some memories return without permission.

An old face.

An old voice.

An old place.

One word was enough to change so many things.

And then a person realizes that life does not only take people from us...

Sometimes it takes with them a complete version of us.

That person who used to trust quickly.

Who used to believe words.

Who used to open his heart without fear.

Who used to think that the good he offered others would one day return to him.

Then one person comes...

and teaches him that not every hand extended to you wants to save you.

Some hands extend to push you.

"What you did to me did not kill me... what killed me is that I did everything to remain a good person, while you did everything to make me hate the person I was."

And yet...

there remained something small in the heart that did not die.

Something that says:

Perhaps a day will come when he will understand.

Perhaps he will apologize.

Perhaps he will realize how much I was hurting.

And perhaps...

Perhaps it will never come.

But days do not wait for our apologies.

And life does not stop at the door of someone who refused to open it.

And so, perhaps the hardest victory for the wronged person is to reach a day when he says:

"I will not allow what you did to me to make me a person like you."

For not every victory is returning pain with pain.

Sometimes victory is to come out of wrongdoing,

without carrying wrongdoing in your character.

A day will come when I will not remember the details of what you did,

but I will well remember the person I was forced to become after you.

And perhaps...

only then will I understand that some people do not enter our lives to stay,

but to leave a painful lesson, then leave.

But the story has not ended...

For there is still a wrongdoer who thinks that days will protect him from the consequence of what he did.