2nd Place Scars

    The first few years in prison are the worst. You're still partially alive so everything hurts. The connections to the real world are still somewhat intact, and like a scrape that has yet to scab over, the memories are fresh enough to be painful. I didn't know it at the time but there is a beauty in that pain. I miss that hurt.

    With every year that passes, my former life seems less real. My past fades from reality to illusion until I'm left wondering what parts are real and what parts only ever existed in my mind. 

    In the beginning that saying 'time heals all wounds' was my wishful mantra. I prayed for those words to prove true. And in my desperate need to dull the pain I never saw that they contained a catch. Time doesn't heal all wounds, it just numbs the pain. And what I didn't know was that the numbness would be worse than the pain it replaced.

    The days unfold into weeks and the months fall into the past. And with each new calendar hung on the wall, a distance grows. A distance from loved ones, a distance from the world...a distance from life. Until nothing is close enough to hurt anymore. The catch is that nothing is close enough to truly love either. 

    The pain has become a foggy memory. Something I can describe but no longer able to feel. And that's when I realized that the pain, once so difficult to live with, was the last remnant of a former life. The last connection to the hopes and Love that I was able to touch but couldn't hold on to. Proof that it was real. That it really happened. The last ties to a life that is now nothing more than and idea stranded somewhere in the past just beyond reach. 

    I'd trade anything to have that gut wrenching pain back in my life, like it used to be. Traces of the hurt still linger. On occasion, the reminder of what once was and what could have been, still takes my breath away, but its not the same. 

    The pain is no longer a sharp debilitating feeling that knots my throat and wobbles my knees. It's changed... It has consolidated into an ever present gravity that sits just behind my heart. And though it hasn't left completely, it is fading, and I fear that I can do nothing more to stop it. 

    For, when it completely leaves me, when the pain finally hardens, I will be left with nothing but a scar to remind me, of a love that once was and a life that could have been...