The rain is loud. It’s pouring down outside, announcing its presence in a tuneless symphony of awkward rhythm and cold shape-shifting harmonies. Part of me wishes the sun was shining instead, warming the damp earth and evaporating this cold while brown smells mingle with green ones in a steamy vapor… the other part wants to go outside and get soaked by the icy droplets until I feel like my soul is clean.

Neither will happen today.

My musical taste is as restless as I am, phases that used to be months long are only lasting mere hours now. What’s going on? There’s some kind of underlying emotion here, something bittersweet, not quite bad but still painful, like sharp knives made of hard candy slitting my heart open from one side to the other. Blood and pain mingling with sugar in a mockingly sweet metallic duet, like love and passion mixing inappropriately with rage and vengeance.

I sit here in my usual sanctuary of a cluttered and chaotic room, weighed down by tasks and to do lists, while my heart tries to pound its way out of my chest as it longs for freedom and fun and sunshine and road trips and new beginnings. My body has other plans for the time being. My mind analyzes the situation and concludes logically that my heart simply wants to escape the memories my mind is putting it through for the sake of introspection and ultimately healing.

Healing is difficult. Healing is painful. Healing is something not everyone is capable of in the same way that my masochistic soul is.

Time doesn’t heal anything unless you let it. In my case, I bury the wounds until I get around to tending them, often months or years later. The little healing that time has allowed suddenly has to be ripped apart, the wound made fresh again, because how else can I be certain that it’s healing correctly?

So I alone am the wielder of the candy knife.