unbelievable, netflix series

there is a feeling you may get, if you are like me, where you see the same suffering in someone else that you have felt in yourself. an unhealed wound, buried but gaping, wide and burning. sometimes the burning is so familiar you don’t know how you would be without it. you forget it’s there, it’s the same as your eyes moving in their sockets and bones grinding in your joints.

when you see it in someone else, on someone else, you remember it’s abnormal. suddenly you are hearing yourself blink, you hear your hair brush your shoulder, you are reminded that this noise, this mess, this pain, is something no one else feels. no one else lives with the aching, the twinging, the agony — if you are so brave to call it that, if you are allowed — it is lonely. it lives alone inside you and makes you alone from everything else.

if you bring it up to yourself, a rift opens between where you are and where the world is. you brush the edge of the wound with your fingertips, and you are sucked away from the world and plunged into a space that is alien. you are far away, inaccessible, even to your body, yourself. you may relive the whole thing, you may escape before the tape plays. but either way, when you are back to the real world, you are miles away from where you were. you are thousands of feet from any person in the room. you are more alone than ever, moved further from yourself and your peers and your life and your world by a space inside you that shouldn’t even be there.

you may ask yourself, “will i ever be normal again?”. you may even say it out loud, whisper it or shout it or carve it in your skin. when you see someone else with it, you wish you could reach through the incredible distance and take their wound away from them, lift their hate and pain and alienation and take it far away and burn it, squash it, contain it so it never finds them again. heal them.

i hope i can be normal again someday. and i hope you can, too.