Just a tightening, just there, now, do you feel it? Your heart a sudden force of suction, absorption, your chest a quickening sinkhole and spasm and your mouth falls open in a silent gasp and if you had anything left inside that dried up bodybag of yours then this is the time when you would be crying.
But you don’t have anything left and your chest heaves, your breath is a sharp spiking, a rolling spur, the shell of a sob and nothing else. Emptiness so pervasive that it even crowds out the luxury of sorrow. Your muscles fight it, faking it, giving you the vehicle for a sadness that is now too embedded and too bony to be extracted and given sound or sigh.
Those breaths fade. And now I’m slipslipping in and out in and out, flickerfade gray and freaked out in a faraway way. I’mnotrealI’mnotrealI’mnotreal in a battered chant like twelve drummers drumming, my fingers reach my carotid artery, my pulse so wild and severe I could grab it mid-throb and toss it away from me, lose the thing that flails in its raw and gross vitality, seizes me in its erratic alarm clangings, rattle me to my empty empty core
oh what am i saying
I forced myself to eat 400 calories of dinner after a negative-calorie day and now my skin has shredded and flaked off and I type on bone and chalk and hardened sinew. Someone take this all away. I will fly to pieces. Words are not adequate for the horror I am, embodied.
Bruises spread across her body, her insides are leaving, no room, and they creep and seep under the last layer of her skin, spreading and sprawling, dark. Stained.
I don’t think I can get better. How could I possibly get better. Who says it’s okay for me to get better. Who says I’m worth it. I don’t want to be here. I want out. I want in. I want anything or anywhere or anybody but this person and this place and this time.
Just please make my heart stop this bullshit. Just be fucking normal. Beat normally.
