The end.

The beginning of the end. 

"Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated." 

-Coretta Scott King-

Hatred is a petty thing, that comes easier than love and when it comes from someone you're close with, you find yourself wondering, 'Just what did I do wrong?' 

And when the hatred isn't justified, when you know, the sensible part in you knows you haven't done anything wrong, that's when guilt-trapping arrives. 

And that is quite a big deal. 

You feel trapped, a person's hatred towards you, that being someone you were close to, someone who was a part of your life or is a part of your life- 

With the trust you put in them and with the time you shared, with the feelings you felt together, with the pain you shared, it feels as if they're using it against you, trapping you within a cage, the shackles of which are born from the hatred they feel towards you- 

You're trapped, unable to breathe. And when the person blames you for things that went wrong with them, the sensible part within you, now a minor dull voice knows it wasn't you and it tries to get you to accept the same but you can't. For the part of you, the part that they saw, the part that spent time with them, it wonders and it wonders until it gets trapped. 

The time within the cage is hard, you get too close to the bars, the thorns prick at you and when you try to make sense of it, when you try to get out of it, it feels pointless and in turn hurts you again and again until you somewhere feel it coming from within, 

'It was my fault.' 

And that is the beginning of the end. 

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."

-James Baldwin

Gradually you become blind. All you see is them, and their version of you. 

You blame yourself, you realize it's your fault, the voice, the sensible voice dulls away with time and the pure darkness of the hatred, the thorns spread all over you. 

They grow over you, constricting movement. They grow within you, constricting feelings- any good one. 

And you suddenly look back at yourself and that's when the hatred seeps in. 

The cracks are filled in by the darkness, an empty-overwhelmingly numb feeling, and when they return to check on you, when you pass by them accidently, when you see yourself in their eyes...

 You don't recognize who you are. 

And that...that is the ending of quite-so everything. 

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." 

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Where the hatred that once started from just a single being, becomes divided and rules two. 

And you realize that it isn't only them...

You hate yourself too. 

A nightmare that is never-ending. A nightmare from which even when you wake up, it haunts you every time you think of it's beginning, every time you face it, every time you remember something related to it. 

And the thorns dig in a bit too deep again. 

But it doesn't hurt. 

Pain is painful only until a while and then...then it just goes numb. You become habitual to it. 

And being habitual to pain...is the worst thing anyone could ever go through. The worst reality anyone could settle for. 

A thing worse than death, is being used to pain just enough that when it isn't even there, there's no change and when it comes back searching for you, doubled somehow, there's no change either. 

The emptiness rises, the numbness overtakes, the darkness within grows like roots overtaking your very soul, and you die from within, you die before you really die. 

You die whilst standing there alive and breathing for the world to see, but only if they could see, they'd see the death within you too.

"Who taught you to hate yourself?" 

-Malcolm X

Learn to live with yourself before you choose to live with someone else. 

"Self-love is not about getting to a place where you love yourself. It's learning to love yourself in the place you are in." 

-Hannah Blum

Why do you think they always preach of self-love nowadays? 

-Because people are busy hating each other to the point where if not for self-love, we'll all be mere pawns held upright by hatred, moved and destroyed by hatred and there'd be no light to survive by.