A Cycle of Hurt

In the depths of my ignorance, there arose within me a sensation I could not name. Perhaps it was love; or perhaps it was only my own misunderstandings, twisted and self-inflicted, that deceived me into naming it so.

In this love—or whatever masquerade of it I had embraced—I encountered betrayal. An aching pain, both sharp and dull, gnawed at me, persistent as shadows. And yet, I bore it all in silence, as though even the agony were a rite to be endured alone.

Then, when another presence emerged near, I, in my own brokenness, brought suffering upon them, perhaps unknowingly but undeniably. It was as if I had become an unwilling vessel of hurt, a mirror for the torment I myself had swallowed.

The absurdity of it—that I might wound others while being wounded myself, that I might perpetuate what I so deeply despised—settled upon me with a weight I could not escape. And it was only in this unending cycle of inflicting and bearing hurt that the meaning of love dawned upon me, stripped bare and chilling in its irony.

Only then, and perhaps too late, did I begin to understand.