A/N For the life of me, I can't remember where I was going with this. I've tried to remember and I friggin can't so... I slapped on an ending and hopefully it's worth reading.
Words did hurt, contrary to the saying.
In fact, they hurt a hell of a lot more than physical pain. Physical injuries can be dealt with, treated, and will, with proper care and time, eventually heal.
Emotional pain. Now that is something else entirely.
Words, thoughts, feelings – they linger beneath the surface where no one can see them. There is no visible damage to be fixed – no bruising or scars that remain as a telltale sign of abuse.
But it's there. A haunting, aching hurt that never completely fades away. It whittles away at ones self-worth, breaking it down into tiny, little pieces until what originally remained is unrecognizable to all who cared to notice.
It is the sad fact of life that very few people actually do take the time to realize. Most people don't look beyond the façade of normalcy – beyond the masks that are set up for everyone to see when all the while the one in emotional agony is praying that someone will realize, will see what is lurking just underneath the skin and help them. There is… safety, Jack supposes, in their ignorance.
If someone is ignorant of another's pain… then they are not required to help fix it. They do not have to see the pain that they helped cause, the damage that they helped inflict.
All anyone wants to do is believe that everyone around them is completely, one hundred percent, fine. That life is wonderful, carefree, happy.
Those descriptions are often applied to him. Never mind that he has gone decades without having a conversation with someone other than himself. Never mind that he is deliberately ignored – pushed aside, forgotten by everyone... simply because they can't make the time. Never mind that they never take the time to find out for themselves if their judgments have any real merit at all.
Never mind. Jack thinks, huffing a laugh that was closer to a sob. There is always an excuse to be had. A reason to be given.
Like those things alone are supposed to make it better.
They don't. Not really. Excuses just mean that something else was more important. And when the mind is hurting, when thoughts are already skewed and jumbled and self-worth is nonexistent… it just makes everything worse.
Life will go on, of course. It always does. But there is no release from the inner torment because the ones that helped cause it don't care... they don't notice and they don't want to. There is no closure, nothing that can make it go away. There is no justice.
It just gets buried. One learns to hide it, to live with it, and maybe if they're really lucky… to eventually forget it.
But Jack has lived too long. There's just too much to remember. Too many years of hurt feelings and misunderstandings and no one ever giving a damn about him. He can bury his emotions and he knows how to have fun but it's only a matter of time before something will happen to set him off – just one dismissal too many and everything he feels comes to the surface and explodes like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Or New Year's Eve.
1968.
Basically. Jack has a lot of emotional issues. I think it comes and goes.