It has to go somewhere

My skin, my bones, they sit in a different room.

Wherever I am, it is static, it is pain, it knows no boundary at which mercy should be bestowed.

How to make someone somewhere else understand?

How to reach with a hand disconnected from myself?

How to scream with a throat I cannot keep from catching?

How to stop tears from eyes I don't recognize?

A mother raising her children.

A couple singing, calling out for each other amongst the trees.

A stream flowing through the landscape, life shallow and deep.

A hook, an arrow, a bullet.

All that they feel, all that they are, reduced.

A trophy, a mount, a kill, a conquest.

A hobby, a game, an ego, a justification.

And you? All that you are?

To feel the wind, and go against it.

To see a soul, and feel no kinship.

To see the world, and need to end it.

Because of you, a death.

A body, once ensouled, now empty.

A husk, a corpse, a carcass, rot and darkness where something once lived.

I cannot believe anything other than that I deserve it. To believe otherwise would mean that they all looked at me and simply chose not only to forgo kindness, but to enact cruelty.

I see her in pictures. Hair lightened by hours alone in the sun, uneven bangs cut by safety scissors alone in the dark. Crooked and gapped teeth, smiling nonetheless. A bear clutched tightly to her chest, as if he can shield her from what's coming. What did she do? Why did she deserve it?

I can feel that pull, living in my bones. It would be so selfish to follow it. Can I be so profoundly selfish? For once and last, may I be selfish?

And yet, now, I can also feel him. Towards him, a pull just as strong. To love him, a selfishness just as profound. Must I take my pain and shove it in his arms?

Does he know, truly, what I am?

I've never met someone more deserving of love, and thus the least deserving to share in my suffering.

Must I show him my blood, to prove its defect? Must he know how deep it runs? How I've butchered myself hoping to find it, to pour the rot from my veins out on the bathroom floor, to finally rid myself.

Saddled with my burdens, would his broad shoulders bend? Darkened by my woe, would his light endure?

Two souls twisted together, alit. To extinguish my flame and allow him to mourn, or to remain. Could I bear to watch him suffocate?

I want the trees to be spattered with me, the fallen leaves to sit in the puddles and gain indecipherable stains. Hikers, hunters, passersby will come, ignorant that they trample over pieces of me.

I want my muscles to deteriorate, my hair to fall out, my bones to crumble and snap.

I want to rot so completely and abhorrently that no one can bear to look at me again.

That no one will dare to touch me again.

I want the bugs to feed on chunks of my flesh, transfer my strength into their tiny bodies.

I will always ferry the Scorpion across the river, I will always be stung and drowned, they can never escape their nature.

I gasp for air and my lungs fill with water, I grasp for help and my hands take hold of nothingness.

Somehow, I survive it. And when I've used the last of my strength to crawl to safety, when I've coughed up enough water and blood to feel my lungs again, another Scorpion crests the hill.

It penetrates my body, speaks directly to my heart and seeps into my marrow.

It reverberates, louder than all the voices that live there, the words I could never bleed out no matter how deep I cut.

I'd crawl through broken glass to follow that voice wherever it led me.

I don't know if it will lead me to happiness. Nothing ever has.

wishing each one was a state border

You're right, I don't know you

but god

Anything at all.

I can feel myself, I can feel her through time.

If I tried to articulate this to anyone else, I don't believe they'd be able to conceptualize it.

I can feel her. Me. We are deeply connected in our suffering.

Suffering transcends time.

I can feel every inch of the past. The future, though barely out of reach, is connected just the same. I can't see it, but I can feel it.

And I can feel that it never stops.

It never stops.

To look back and remember a happy childhood, that would be lovely. I look back and I see me, alone. In my room, in closets, up in the trees, always alone. I was surrounded, four of you that could have been there in lieu of the two that made me. But you must have looked at me and saw someone unworthy, just like they did. Something repugnant, profane, deserving of the deprivation. We talk now, and yet sometimes I can't even hear you over the memory of the silence.

I look at my baby sister, my baby brother, and I can't do anything but care. It's painful, how much love I have for them. I look back with so much regret, wishing I was one of you, old enough to take better care of them. I did my best, I think. Did you do your best? I know you were children, but so was I. Why do you think I kill myself for them, for those two and those two alone? Or more accurately, why do you think I live for them? Even among this emptiness, this void that threatens to pull me into it. Even after what's been done to me, even the little you know, how could you think anyone would be able to live for themselves after that?

Was it always this way? Did my mother bear me while clinging to the walls? Did she let herself fall, empty her hands so that I could be placed in them?