Shame, 2024

Olena Kainska  

When you abandoned me and left, I felt so ashamed that my knees buckled. It was as if the tension that kept me upright had loosened or disappeared, and I might fall. Right into the mud, from which it would be oh so hard to get up.
When you went away and left me all alone and said that you no longer love me, and maybe you never loved me, I felt so ashamed that I felt like I was burning with fire. And my legs started to hurt. I became heavy and faint, I stopped and lay down, sometimes I cried, and sometimes I couldn't cry at all.
I was so ashamed that all that shame did not go into screaming and crying, but poured down my body like a heavy black resin, flowing down until it reached my knees. And in those knees it settled, making it impossible to move, to run, to jump, to be happy, to be light. It was as if I was shackled to one place, to an old, unclean house, where I have to sit all the time. And I can't run away from there. I don't want people to see me by accident and offend their eyes with my appearance.
I tried to cover up that shame so that others would not see it. With smiles, lace, red lipstick, cats and dogs, cheerfulness and fat, numerous problems that seem to keep me from leaving the house, a lot of work that makes me not have time to laugh.
Hard eggs of that resin formed deep inside each of my knees. The resin of shame. Hardened old stinking shame - the anger that I did not release in time. I didn't break plates, didn't insult those who insulted me, didn't scream or fight, but endured everything quietly in the hope that they would take pity on me and let me live in a dog kennel near their rich house for a while.