Just when you though it was safe

...to go back in the water, or to relax, or to believe for a moment that you could not be triggered. Again. I realize this sort of thing happens but seriously I thought some of this was over. But once again I got reminded how long things, people who have hurt you take to process and get over.

It was one of those moments where you think all is well and one crack in the surface and it's like falling into a bottomless pit of emotion. You sit there with feelings that hard to name, hard to experience; tears are forming but not falling; dinner that tasted lovely now makes you feel queasy.

"What will you do differently" she asks out of the blue. "Do? About what?"
"About not getting in that situation again." My first thought about how to avoid the problems of the last relationship and at least one other is, I will stay with you because you are safe, honest and love me well. But I do not say that because that is not about me changing; what got me into some binds is my nature - to be nice, to give second, third and fourth chances, to want to believe that people are good, that love does not lead one down a blind alley with no escape. So my answer is "I don't know", because I have no idea how to act outside of my nature even when I have enough examples that show I should be more cautious, more hidden, less open. Even though I thought perhaps I would actually cry when in the car as we drove home in the dark, I did not. Instead I did what I often do, I shut it down and out. Moved away from the gaping maw of hurt that threatened to turn me inside out, exposing every wounded part of me to the open air. If I had given in, all those wounds, some decades old would engulf me. That is always the fear and it is an old protection, one I should probably find a way to give up. I keep trying to do that, but in the end the cover comes out and the feelings, the release gets tapped down.

Maybe later, in the dark dark night it will come out. Or not.