The sadness burns and consumes. Sometimes it’s a slow burning flame, lit inside and slowly growing. Other times it’s a painful blaze that turns my heart to ash in an instant. I sit and cry, trembling, trying to hold in the pain, but it never ends. I smile, and others think I am happy, but it’s just a mask set carefully in place long ago.

 

Betrayal. It’s suffocating. It hits and my breath grows short, my body gasps for air, but there is nothing there to sustain me. Tendrils of hurt creep throughout my system, constricting and crushing until all that’s left is a shriveled shell. There’s no one left to breathe new life into my soul.

 

Shame is a cancer, spreading fast and killing everything in its path. First it takes the mind, makes it weak, makes it afraid, makes it less than it was. The heart dies along with the body and the spirit, and there’s no one here to care. No one to mourn the beauty that was, no one to save what might be left. No one. Nothing. Empty.

 

Gone.