Wrap it in Words

I’m sick.

My body is rotting. My mind is rotting. Chunks of flesh and thought putrify and fall off; full of pus and hate and stale blood.

I feel it, I feel it happen. I feel my cells, my neurons dying. I feel every single one, every last one, gasp in pain. I hear their death-rattle echoing in my ears.

In the night, the night, they die. I am rotting.

I wonder if the end will come quickly, or if I will lose an ear, a finger, an emotion at a time. I think it is more likely that the poison is eating away at my connections. At the points where one bone meets another, where my thoughts converge. One day, soon or late, these connections will all snap at once, and I will fall into a pile of parts. My thoughts will be unlinked; flying free and solitary. They will waste away and die, too, for no thought can survive without another to sustain it, develop it.

I will be a pile of parts. Rotten. Flies will buzz and breed on my remains and maggots will flourish.

I get confused, sometimes. My eyes unfocus and all I can see are blocks of colour. My bed, the walls, the passing cars - they all break down into shapes that grind together to create a whole. Things are clearer, then, but more obscured.

Sometimes, I….

I just get confused.

It’s hard, hard to put the pieces back together. My brain used to do it for me, but now I have to gather them up, shard by shard, and glue them back with sticky lines of effort. They cut me, sometimes.

Sharp. Yes… Yes.

And why, why, why are you here, with your sharp questions that poke and tear open every crevice of me; every inch, every pore? Do you rape me with your words? Do you defile me with your explorations, do you torment me with your lies? Do you? Do….?

Do, or do not. I always thought that was stupid. There’s always a middle ground. You can push the boulder all the way up the mountain, but if you don’t shove it that final distance over the cliff, then the job isn’t done? No. It’s all about the doing. I’ve always been doing.

Doing the wrong thing, the right thing, the best thing, the worst thing, the every thing. I just want to rest, and stop the doing. But it keeps happening.

My body is a machine; it clicks and whirrs at me, beeping in protest, or maybe in satisfaction. I cant understand its messages. I let it get on with it, most of the time. When they fill me with acids and posions and morphines it protests, at first. But it succumbs to their warmth. It always does. I do.

I…. just get confused, sometimes.

I want to hunt out the virus. Stalk it, find the root of the darkness. Begin inside, and dig. Find that bright black marble that weighs a thousand suns and yet fits snugly in the pit of the belly.

I want to follow its poison, track its course through the arteries and veins and watch the heart strain to pump the toxin from the crown to the toes. And further.

I want to follow its progress to the brain, track its effects. I want to write what it feels like, deep, deep down. I want to capture every sick stray thought that flits by through the day, every thought that is too dangerous, too perverse, the ones that never can be spoken aloud. And I want to track those thoughts, hunt them down through the Serengeti of the mind, see where they start, split, fizzle out, and end.

I want to work from the inside out. Discover how it spreads and flows and comes pouring out with each touch. How the fingers, the tongue, the eyes become carriers, how the it bleeds out into the world and affects the people next to you, down the street, in your life.

It’s in the home. It’s in your mother, father, friend. It’s in the day to day. Its in those little twitches and flinches that add up to a horror more unbearable than a knife in the dark. It’s already here, it’s always been here.

I will hunt it down. And when I have tracked it through the forests of years, watching it, imitating its moves, following where it leads, I will find it. And I will have become it.

Sometimes, I wish the men in the white coats would come to take me away. I wish they’d come and break down the door with their syringes and straightjackets.

Why?

So I could fight them. So I could tear out hanks of hair and rip off ears with my teeth and break noses with my forehead. So I can bloody them as they have bloodied me.

So I could fight the people that say: you are sick and we will fix you.

I am not yours to fix.

And when I would stand, triumphant, over their broken and bleeding bodies, I would take a piece of newspaper, gather them up in it like the flies and parasites they are, and flush them down the toilet.

Come, come, come, take me away-oh

Take me away, away, away, away-oh

Let’s play, play, play, play-oh

Come and set me free.

This whole triggering phenomenon is starting to wreck my head.

I’m seeing people put it at the top of their posts, in their own stories, tagging it - everywhere.

Now, maybe I’m just being naive, but I see it this way - if something reminds you of your own issues, that is your problem. It isn’t up to other people to put safety warnings on their posts. I come across a lot of self-harmers online, and I could easily say - that triggers me, take it down. But I wont, because what I take from their posts is about me, and is therefore my responsibility.

I write a lot about my depression. Sometimes in graphic detail, sometimes I try to wrap it up in words. If someone is ‘triggered’ by what I write, they can get the hell off my blog.

Or just pull the trigger.

Im so fed up of it not being socially acceptable for someone to say - ‘Oh, my depression is acting up’.

Why is it okay to say something like this about any other type of illness? You wouldn’t make someone with a broken leg, or diabetes, or a flu go out into the world and make themselves known.

Why is it not okay to say that you are mentally ill and cannot cope with the situations that are put in front of you?

I scared myself tonight.

I was out with my roommates, doing the whole ‘last night out’ thing, and I couldn’t cope. I just couldn’t. I was dying inside, melting and burning.

And then… I snapped. I completely snapped. I retreated inside myself until I found that core of pain and darkness and knife-tips, and i put myself there. I was floating above myself. I put my whole self there, inside, and left my body on auto-pilot. It walked, it talked, it danced, it flirted - it did all the things I couldn’t do. But I wasn’t there.

And my core stayed deep down and planned murder, and suicide, and everything in between. And I laughed. And laughed. And everyone looked at me strangely, worrying if I was ok. But I wasn’t there. So I laughed until I tore at my hair and couldn’t breath.

And now I’m crashing. And burning. Gone up in flames.